Lockdown loaded

The de­ci­sion to send at least four mil­lion “non-es­sen­tial” work­ers back to their jobs on April 13 strikes me as an ex­treme mis­take. A dan­ger­ous one. This was a Span­ish gov­ern­ment move and was op­posed pub­licly by Cata­lan pres­i­dent Quim Torra. He (and lit­tle ol’ in­signif­i­cant me) will have been proved to a sig­nif­i­cant de­gree, right or wrong by the time you are read­ing this ar­ti­cle a few weeks later.

If I’ve been shown to be mis­taken then I humbly apol­o­gise to Mr Sanchez and that means you can stop read­ing my words from here on in. But in my opin­ion, which is also the opin­ion of count­less med­ical and sci­en­tific pro­fes­sion­als, the risk of so many peo­ple re­turn­ing to work­places, pub­lic trans­port, cafes, restau­rants, street pave­ments, parks and every­where else in be­tween, is too many mil­lion risks to take.

This is be­cause Mr Sanchez’ de­ci­sion is highly likely to lead to an­other jump in coro­n­avirus cases, in­clud­ing the num­bers of peo­ple need­ing spe­cialised med­ical treat­ment. That, as we have al­ready seen this spring, puts un­bear­able stress on those masked he­roes we have been ap­plaud­ing (and grossly un­der­pay­ing) in the pub­lic hos­pi­tal sys­tem. Again, they too are fac­ing pos­si­bly being in­fected and even dying them­selves.

Going back to work ‘en masse’ sim­ply means that new cases of Covid-19 in­fec­tion here are added to the ex­ist­ing ones, mul­ti­ply­ing and mag­ni­fy­ing the pan­demic’s dev­as­ta­tion. This is eas­ily avoid­able by con­tin­u­ing the quar­an­tine pe­riod. That’s my ar­gu­ment.

Trag­i­cally, coun­tries across south­ern Eu­rope, and most es­pe­cially ours, have failed to learn from the much more suc­cess­ful strate­gies used in places such as Korea, India, and New Zealand. There, they tested huge num­bers of the pop­u­la­tion and ap­plied more re­stric­tive quar­an­tine mea­sures a whole lot faster, sooner (now longer) and com­pre­hen­sively.

In essence, they took the threat of this in­vis­i­ble killer ex­tremely se­ri­ously and their cau­tious-minded lead­ers were not afraid to act in the en­tire pub­lic’s in­ter­est. They put peo­ple’s health ahead of any con­cerns about costs to busi­ness or the na­tional bud­get.

Mean­while, as the virus ebbs and flows across the globe, one thing that will not be saved is the liv­ing con­di­tions of so many in Cat­alo­nia and wider Eu­rope. Un­less of course the his­tor­i­cal idea of spread­ing wealth more fairly and col­lec­tively takes off again and our rep­re­sen­ta­tives see the merit in it. There are plenty in the shrink­ing mid­dle class and suf­fer­ing work­ing classes who are des­per­ately hop­ing for gen­uine eco­nomic change as a re­sult of these trou­bled times.

Un­for­tu­nately, we can seem­ingly for­get that the Eu­ro­pean Union will re­ally help out. As pro­gres­sive pan-Eu­ro­pean DiEM25’s Yanis Varo­ufakis re­cently com­mented, the Eu­rogroup’s un­der­ly­ing mes­sage to a large ma­jor­ity of Ital­ians, Spaniards, and Greeks ,etc (given that 97% of the €500bn “stim­u­lus” pack­age is new na­tional debt) is that it must all be re­paid through fur­ther aus­ter­ity via new cuts to each na­tion’s bud­gets and ser­vices. This bur­den of course falls most harshly on the very cit­i­zens who can af­ford it the least.

Out here though, in Penedès, where I live, the farm­ers in the vine­yards con­tinue to go about their busi­ness of being in the “busi­ness of plea­sure,” as I heard a French wine pro­ducer call it. After all, the grapes don’t know how to self-iso­late. They don’t un­der­stand the grav­ity of the spring they have just sprung up in. And it seems to me that this year their leaves seem big­ger and greener, ear­lier than I’ve ever seen them.

This ar­ti­cle is ded­i­cated to the mem­ory of Theresa-Eu­nice “Terry” Par­ris (1926-2020).