Pandemia and world system |Opinion |Telesur

A TOTAL SOCIAL FACT

Everything is moving so fast. No pandemic was ever so sudden and of such magnitude. Emerging barely a hundred days ago in a distant unknown city, a virus has already traveled the entire planet, forcing billions of people to lock themselves in their homes. Something only imaginable in post-apocalyptic fiction...

At this point, nobody ignores that pandemic is not just a health crisis. It is what the social sciences qualify as "total social fact", in the sense that it convulses the set of social relations, and shocks all the actors, institutions and values.

Humanity is living - with fear, suffering and perplexity - an inaugural experience. Verifying concretely that that theory of the "end of history" is a fallacy... Discovering that history, in reality, is unpredictable. We are faced with an enigmatic situation. Unprecedented[1]. No one knows how to interpret and clarify this strange moment of such opacity, when our societies continue to tremble on their foundations as if shaken by a cosmic cataclysm. And there are no signs to help us orient ourselves... A world is collapsing. When everything ends life will no longer be the same.

Just a few weeks ago, dozens of popular protests had spread on a planetary scale, from Hong Kong to Santiago de Chile, passing through Tehran, Baghdad, Beirut, Algiers, Paris, Barcelona and Bogotá. The new coronavirus has been turning them off one by one as it spread, fast and furious, around the world... The scenes of festive masses occupying streets and squares are followed by unusual images of empty, silent, spectral avenues. Silent emblems that will forever mark the memory of this strange moment.

We are suffering in our own existence the famous 'butterfly effect': someone, on the other side of the planet, eats a strange animal and three months later, half of humanity is in quarantine... Proof that the world is a system in the one that every element that composes it, however insignificant it may seem, interacts with others and ends up influencing the whole.

Distressed, citizens turn their eyes to science and scientists -as in the past to religion- imploring the discovery of a saving vaccine whose process will require long months. Because the human immune system takes time to produce antibodies, and some dangerous side effects can take time to manifest…

People also seek refuge and protection in the State which, after the pandemic, could return with force to the detriment of the Market. In general, the more traumatic the collective fear, the more it fuels the desire for the State, for Authority, for Guidance. On the other hand, international and multilateral organizations of all kinds (UN, International Red Cross, G7, G20, IMF, NATO, World Bank, OAS, WTO, etc.) have not lived up to the tragedy, due to their silence or for its inconsistency. The planet discovers, stupefied, that there is no commander on board... Discredited for its structural complicity with pharmaceutical multinationals[2], the World Health Organization (WHO) itself has lacked sufficient authority to assume, as it should, the leadership of the global fight against the new plague.

Meanwhile, governments helplessly witness the unstoppable spread across all continents[3] of this new plague. Against which there is neither a vaccine, nor a medicine, nor a cure, nor a treatment that eliminates the virus from the organism[4]... And that will last[5]... As long as the germ continues to be present in any country, re-infections will be inevitable and cyclical. Most likely, this epidemic will not be able to stop before the microbe has infected around 60% of humanity.

What seemed dystopian and typical of science fiction dictatorships has become 'normal'. People are fined for leaving their house to stretch their legs, or for walking their dog. We accept that our cell phones monitor us and report us to the authorities. And it is being proposed that anyone who goes out without their phone be sanctioned and punished with prison.

The long neoliberal autism is widely criticized, particularly because of its devastating policies of privatization at all costs of the public health systems that have turned out to be criminal, and are revealed to be absurd. As Yuval Noah Harari has said: «Governments that saved costs in recent years by cutting health services, will now spend much more because of the epidemic[6]. » The screams of agony of the thousands of sick people who died for not having beds in the Intensive Care Units (ICU) condemn for a long time the fanatics of privatizations, cuts and austerity policies.

There is now open talk of nationalizing, relocating, reindustrializing, pharmaceutical and health sovereignty. A word that the neoliberals stigmatized, cornered and banished is used again: solidarity. The world economy is paralyzed by the first global quarantine in history. Throughout the world there is a crisis of both demand and supply. Some one hundred and seventy countries (of the one hundred and ninety-five that exist) will have negative growth in 2020. In other words, an economic tragedy worse than the Great Recession of 1929. Millions of businessmen and workers wonder if they will die of the virus or of the bankruptcy and unemployment.

David Beasley, Executive Director of the World Food Program (WFP), has warned about the catastrophic situation that is coming: «We are on the verge of a 'pandemic of malnutrition'. The number of people suffering from severe hunger could double between now and the end of the year, surpassing the figure of 250 million people...[7] » Nobody knows who will take care of the fields, if the crops will fail, if there will be a lack of food, if we will return to rationing… The apocalypse is knocking at our door.

The only glimmer of hope is that, with the planet in pause mode, the environment has had a breather. The air is more transparent, the vegetation more expansive, the animal life freer. The air pollution that kills millions of people every year has receded. Suddenly, washed from the dirt of pollution, nature has looked so beautiful again... As if the ultimatum to Earth that the coronavirus throws at us was also a desperate one Final alert on our suicidal route to climate change: «Watch out! Next stop: collapse. »

On the geopolitical scene, the spectacular irruption of an unknown actor -the new coronavirus- has completely disrupted the chessboard of the world-system. On all the war fronts -Libya, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sahel, Gaza, etc.-, the fighting has been suspended... The plague has imposed de facto, with more authority than the Security Council itself, an effective Pax Coronavírica …

In international politics, the terrifying management of this crisis by President Donald Trump deals a very hard blow to the world leadership of the United States, which has not known how to help itself or anyone else. China, on the other hand, after an erratic start in the fight against the new plague, has managed to recover, send aid to a hundred countries, and seems to be overcoming the greatest trauma suffered by humanity in centuries. The future of the new world order could be at stake right now...

In any case, the shocking reality is that the most powerful powers and the most sophisticated technologies have been unable to stop the global spread of covid-19[8], a disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2[9 ], the new great planetary killer.

THE CORONAVIRUS

The number of victims continues to grow... At the time we write these lines, the number of deaths exceeds one hundred and fifty thousand... The number of those infected exceeds two and a half million ... And those confined to their homes are more than four billion... The latter had never happened either... The words 'confinement' and 'quarantine' that seemed to belong to forgotten times and to the medieval lexicon have become common words. The ones that best illustrate our current abnormal normality.

There is controversy, at the highest level[10], about the origin of this virus that appeared in Wuhan (Hubei, China). Since 'patient zero'[11], that is, the first infection from animal to human, has not yet been identified, various speculations circulate. On the one hand, authorities in Beijing accused the US army of having manufactured the germ in a military laboratory in Fort Detrick (Frederick, Maryland) as a bacteriological weapon to stop the Chinese rise in the world, and for having dispersed it in China on the occasion of the World Military Games, a competition held in October 2019, precisely… in Wuhan[12]. On the other hand, in the United States, President Trump himself repeatedly incriminated Beijing[13], after the influential Republican Senator from Arkansas, Tom Cotton, sometimes presented as the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), blamed Chinese military scientists[14] for having produced the new germ in a "virology and biosafety" laboratory also located... in Wuhan[15].

Widely disseminated by conspiracy adherents of 'conspiracy theories' on both sides, these contradictory versions (there are others[16]) have circulated widely on social networks[17]. They have little foundation. Solvent scientific studies rule out that the new coronavirus is a designer biological weapon released intentionally or by accident[18]: "Our analyzes clearly demonstrate that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a deliberately manipulated virus[19]" , affirmed emphatically the professor of the University of Sydney (Australia) Edward C. Holmes, the best world expert on the new pathogen.

We still don't know much about this infectious agent: we don't know, for example, if it has already mutated or is about to mutate... Or why it infects men more than women. Nor what are the determinants that make two people with similar characteristics - young, healthy, without associated pathologies - develop opposite forms of the disease, one mild, the other serious or fatal. Nor why children almost never have severe forms of the infection. Neither if the cured patients continue to transmit the plague, nor if they are really immunized...

But there is broad agreement among international researchers[20] to recognize that this new germ has emerged in the same way as others before it: jumping from animal to human beings… Bats, birds and various mammals (particularly pigs). ) naturally harbor multiple coronaviruses. In humans, there are seven known types of coronaviruses that can infect us. Four of them cause various varieties of the common cold. And another three, of recent appearance, produce much more lethal disorders such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002 ; Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), which emerged in 2012 ; and finally this new disease, Covid-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2, whose first outbreak was detected, as we have already said, in the Wuhan seafood market in December 2019. This new germ would have the bat as 'original host' and another animal not yet formally identified - the pangolin[21] ?-, as an 'intermediate host' from which, after becoming particularly dangerous, it would have jumped to humans.

What is not fully understood is why, if we already live with six other coronaviruses and we have them under global control, has this new pathogen caused such a colossal pandemic? What is so special about this germ? Why has its speed of infection exceeded the forecasts of the best health authorities in the world?

Undoubtedly, as has been repeated many times, conditions unrelated to the virus such as the current speed of communications, hypermobility and the intensity of exchanges in the era of globalization have favored its spread. Obvious. But then why didn't SARS in 2002 or MERS in 2012, also caused by new coronaviruses, 'globalize' all over the planet in the same way?

To answer these questions, the first thing to remember is that “viruses are disturbing because they are neither alive nor dead. They are not alive because they cannot reproduce on their own. They are not dead because they can enter our cells, hijack their machinery, and replicate. And in that they are efficient and sophisticated because they have spent millions of years developing new ways to outwit our immune system[22]. » But what specifically distinguishes SARS-CoV-2 from other killer viruses is precisely its strategy of silent irradiation. In other words, its ability to spread without arousing suspicion, not even in its own victim. At least during the first days of contagion in which the infected person does not present any symptoms of the disease.

We don't know for sure why the virus travels so quickly, but what we do know is that from the moment it enters its victim's body - through the eyes, nose or mouth - it already begins to replicate in a different way. exponential... According to researcher Isabel Sola, from the Spanish National Center for Biotechnology: "Once inside the first human cell, each coronavirus generates up to 100,000 copies of itself in less than 24 hours...[23]". But also, another unique and cunning feature of this pathogen is that, when invading a human body, it concentrates its first attack, when it is still undetectable, in the upper respiratory tract of the infected person, from the nose to the throat, where it replicates. with frantic intensity. From that moment on, that person –who does not feel anything– becomes a powerful bacteriological bomb and begins to massively spread the lethal virus in their environment -simply by speaking or breathing...

This is the main feature, the fatal uniqueness of this new coronavirus. In China, up to 86% of infections were due to asymptomatic people, without detectable signs of infection. At the University of Oxford, a group of researchers showed that up to half of SARS-CoV-2 infections are due to undiagnosed individuals without apparent symptoms.

Only a minority of those infected suffer the second attack of the germ, concentrated this time in the lungs, in a similar way to SARS in 2002 (although the viral load of the new coronavirus is a thousand times higher than that of SARS), causing pneumonia that they can become lethal, especially in people over 65 with chronic diseases.

As the number of infected is massive and simultaneous, this minority -which represents 15% of all those infected -and which is the one that will go to hospitals-, can quickly reach very high figures depending on the volume of population... As we have seen in China, Iran, Italy, Spain, France, the United Kingdom or the United States, it is enough for several thousand people to go to hospital emergencies at the same time to collapse the entire health system of any country, no matter how highly developed. whatever[24]…

In Wuhan, Tehran, Milan, Madrid, Paris, London or New York, doctors and nurses soon found themselves completely overwhelmed. There was a lack of masks, disinfectant gel, protective material for health personnel, ICU beds, respirators, etc. In several cities (Wuhan, Madrid, New York), the authorities, overwhelmed, had to resort to the Armed Forces or civilian volunteers to build makeshift hospitals with thousands of beds at full speed. Almost everywhere, the authorities confessed that they had not foreseen such an avalanche of patients, "a continuous tsunami of patients in serious condition...[25]".

A WELL ANNOUNCED PANDEMIC

Faced with an avalanche of criticism for what public opinion perceived as a 'mismanagement' of the pandemic, some governments also argued that the speed of the pandemic attack had caught them by surprise. surprise... Donald Trump, for example, did not hesitate to affirm repeatedly -when the first deaths from coronavirus occurred in his country, months after China or Europe-, that "nobody knew that there would be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion ", and that it was an "unpredictable problem", "something that nobody expected", "arising out of nowhere...[26]",

Many things can be said to explain the lack of preparation of the authorities in the face of this brutal scourge, but the argument of surprise is not acceptable. First, because there is a famous public health proverb: "Outbreaks are inevitable, epidemics are not." Second, because dozens of fiction and science fiction authors -from James Graham Ballard to Stephen King through Cormac McCarthy or the filmmaker Steven Soderbergh in his film Contagion (2011)- described in detail the apocalyptic health nightmare that threatened the world. Third, because visionary personalities – Rosa Luxemburg, Gandhi, Fidel Castro, Hans Jonas, Ivan Illich, Jürgen Habermas – have long warned that looting and looting the environment could have disastrous health consequences. Fourth, because recent epidemics such as SARS in 2002, Bird Flu in 2005[27], Swine Flu in 2009[28] and MERS in 2012 had already reached uncontainable pandemic levels in some cases and had caused thousands of deaths in all the planet. Fifth, because when the first death from the new coronavirus occurred in the United States, on March 10, 2020 in New Jersey-as we have already said-, it had been almost three months since the epidemic had broken out in Wuhan and had quickly overwhelmed the entire health system both in China and in several European nations; that is, there was time to prepare. And sixth, because dozens of prospectivists and several recent reports had issued very serious warnings about the imminence of the emergence of some kind of new virus that could cause something like the mother of all epidemics.

Perhaps the most important of these analyzes was presented, in November 2008, by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the CIA's geopolitical anticipation office, which published for the White House a report entitled « Global Trends 2025 : A Transformed World» [29]. This document resulted from the pooling - reviewed by the intelligence agencies of the United States - of studies prepared by some two thousand five hundred independent experts from universities in some thirty-five countries in Europe, China, India, Africa, Latin America, Arab-Muslim world, etc.

With an unusual sense of anticipation, the confidential document announced, by 2025, "the emergence of a new, highly transmissible and virulent human respiratory disease for which there are no adequate countermeasures, and which could become a global pandemic." ". The report warned that “the emergence of a pandemic disease depends on mutation or genetic rearrangement of currently circulating disease strains, or the emergence of a new pathogen in humans that could be a highly pathogenic avian influenza strain such as H5N1, or other pathogens, such as the SARS coronavirus, that also have this potential."

The report warned, impressively in advance, that "if a pandemic disease were to emerge, it would likely occur in an area marked by high population density and close human-animal association, such as many areas in southern China and the southeast." Asia, where wild animal husbandry practices are unregulated which could allow a virus to mutate and cause a potentially pandemic zoonotic disease...".

The authors also foresaw the risk of too slow a response from the authorities : “It could take weeks before definitive laboratory results confirming the existence of a new disease with pandemic potential. Meanwhile, the sick would begin to appear in the cities of Southeast Asia. Despite the limits imposed on international travel, travelers with mild symptoms or asymptomatic people could transmit the disease to other continents". In such a way that "waves of new cases would occur in a few months. The absence of an effective vaccine and the universal lack of immunity would make populations vulnerable to infection In the worst case, tens to hundreds of thousands of Americans within the United States would become ill, and global deaths would be estimated in the millions ".

As if that document was not enough, another more recent report, from January 2017, prepared this time by the Pentagon and also addressed to the President of the United States (who was already Donald Trump), again clearly warned that "the The most likely and significant threat to US citizens is a new respiratory disease" and that, in that scenario, "all industrialized countries, including the United States, would lack respirators, medicines, hospital beds, protective equipment, and masks to deal with a possible pandemic [30]".

Despite such explicit and repeated warnings, Donald Trump did not hesitate to get rid of, a few months after this latest report (!), the Committee in charge -within the National Security Council- of the Protection of Global Health and Biodefense, chaired by Admiral Timothy Ziemer, a recognized expert in epidemiology[31]. That Committee of technicians was precisely the one that should lead decision-making in the event of a new pandemic... "But -explains the journalist Lawrence Wright, who interviewed Ziemer and all the members of that Committee- Trump eliminated those who knew the most about this matter... One of many colossal mistakes by the President of the United States. Records will show that he was responsible for one of the most catastrophic public health failures in the history of this country. If only he had listened, months ago, to the warnings of the health services intelligence and public health experts about the serious threat posed by the coronavirus outbreak in China, the current explosion of covid-19 cases could have been avoided.[32]".

It would also have been enough for Trump and other world leaders to have listened to the repeated warnings issued by the WHO itself. In particular the cry of alarm that this organization launched in September 2019, that is, the eve of the first attack of the new coronavirus in Wuhan. The WHO did not hesitate to warn that the next plague could be apocalyptic: "We are facing the very real threat of a massive, extremely deadly pandemic caused by a respiratory pathogen that could kill 50 to 80 million people and wipe out nearly 5% of the world economy.A global pandemic of that scale would be a catastrophe, unleashing chaos, instability and insecurity widespread. The world is not ready. [33]".

With even greater precision, another previous report had already warned about the specific danger of the new coronaviruses: "The presence of a large reservoir of viruses similar to SARS-CoV in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China is a time bomb… The possibility of the emergence of another SARS caused by novel coronaviruses from animals cannot be ruled out, therefore it is a must to be prepared.[34]”

Between 2011 and 2019, numerous scientists did not stop sounding the alarm about several infectious outbreaks that, according to them, heralded a greater frequency of appearance of potentially fast-spreading pests, increasingly difficult to stop...[35 ] Former President Barack Obama himself, in December 2014, pointed out that investment should be made in health infrastructure to be able to face the possible arrival of a new type of epidemic. He even recalled that a scourge similar to the "Kansas flu" (wrongly called "Spanish") of 1918 can always be presented: "Probably there may come a time when we have to face a deadly disease, and to be able to deal with it , we need infrastructure, not only here in the United States but also around the world to be able to quickly detect and isolate it.[36]"

It is also well known that, in 2015, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, warned that all the conditions were met for the appearance of a new infectious scourge that could easily be spread throughout the world by asymptomatic patients: « It may be that a virus arises -he explained- with which people feel well enough, while they are infected, to get on a plane or go to the supermarket... And that would mean that the virus could spread throughout the world very quickly... The Bank World Cup estimates that a planetary epidemic of this type would cost no less than three trillion dollars, with millions and millions of deaths...[37] »

In other words, despite Donald Trump and those leaders who spoke of "surprise" or "astonishment", the reality is that the imminent danger of the outbreak of a new coronavirus that would it could jump from animals to humans, and cause a terrifying pandemic… «Science knew what was going to happen. Governments knew it could happen, but they didn't bother to prepare. – explains veteran science reporter and popularizer David Quammen who, to write his book Contagion[38] (Spillover. Animal infections and the next human pandemic), traveled to the four corners of the planet chasing zoonotic viruses, that is, those that jump from animals to humans – The ads said: it could happen next year, in three years, or in eight. The politicians said to each other: I will not spend the money for something that may not happen under my watch. This is the reason why money was not spent on more hospital beds, on intensive care units, on respirators, on masks, on gloves… The science and the right technology to deal with the virus exist. But there was no political will. There is also no will to combat climate change. The difference between this and climate change is that this is killing faster.[39] »

In other words, this pandemic is the most predictable catastrophe in American history. Obviously much more so than Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination or 9/11. The warnings about the imminent attack of a new coronavirus were abundant and notorious. No investigations by any top-secret intelligence service were needed to know what was coming. It was known... They knew it... The disaster could have been avoided...

CLIMATE CHANGE

Although the origin of everything, as David Quammen says, lies in the eco-predatory behaviors that condemn us, if we do not prevent it, to the fate of climate change. What is really at issue is the production model that has been plundering nature and changing the climate for decades. For decades, militant environmentalists have been warning that the human destruction of biodiversity is creating the objective conditions for new viruses and new diseases to appear: «Deforestation, the opening of new roads, mining and hunting are activities involved in the triggering of different epidemics -explains, for example, Alex Richter-Boix, doctor in biology and specialist in climate change- Various viruses and other pathogens are found in wild animals. When human activities come into contact with wildlife, a pathogen can jump up and infect domestic animals and from there jump back to humans; or directly from a wild animal to humans… Bats, primates and even snails can have diseases that, at a given moment, when we alter their natural habitats, can jump to humans. [40]»

For millions of years, animals have had a great diversity of viruses in their bodies against which, during this long coexistence, they have managed to develop immunity. But when man removes an animal from its natural environment, that balance is broken, and a virus can then be transmitted to another species with which the animal has never lived... The destruction of the habitats of wild species and the invasion of those wild ecosystems due to urban or industrial projects create their own situations for the accelerated mutation of viruses… This is probably what happened in Wuhan. For years, many Chinese animal organizations have been demanding a permanent ban on the trade and consumption of wild animals in order to conserve the species and, above all, avoid foreseeable epidemics[41].

Europe and the United States ignored all these warnings. And when 'the pandemic of pandemics' arrived, their governments had not taken any precautions, they had not prepared any strategy to follow, nor action measures in the short, medium and long term... On the other hand, in East Asia, the models of management of the epidemic were more successful. Especially in South Korea. In one of the most commented articles on this crisis[42], the Berlin-based South Korean intellectual Byung-Chul Han, an adherent of dataism, praised the "digital biopolitics" implemented by the South Korean government and stated that Asian countries were facing this pandemic. better than the West because they relied on new technologies, big data and algorithms. Minimizing the risk of intrusion into privacy: «Critical awareness in the face of digital surveillance -Byung-Chul Han admitted- is, in Asia, practically non-existent.[43] »

HEALTH CYBERSURVEILLANCE

The new coronavirus is spreading so fast and there are so many infected people who are asymptomatic that it is, in effect, impossible to trace its spread by hand. The best way to pursue such an undetectable microorganism is by using a computerized system, thanks to mobile phone devices, that calculates how many people were close to the infected[44]. South Korea, Singapore and China, often cited as nations that have succeeded in tackling the coronavirus, have in particular applied big data and digital surveillance strategies to keep infection numbers under control. This "technological solutionism[45]" supposes the sacrifice of a part of individual privacy. And that obviously raises problems.

In South Korea, the authorities created an application for smartphones designed to have greater control over the spread of the coronavirus through digital monitoring of citizens present in contagion areas or suffering from the disease... This app is called “Self -Quarantine Safety Protection“, and has been developed by the Ministry of the Interior and Security. The app discovers if a citizen has been in risk areas. You know if your test is positive or not. If it is positive, it orders you to confine yourself in quarantine. It also tracks the movements of all those infected and traces the contacts of each of them. The places where the infected people went are made known to the mobile phones of those people who were nearby. And all of them are sent in quarantine. When citizens receive a stay-at-home order from their local medical center, they are legally prohibited from leaving their quarantine zone - usually their homes - and are required to maintain a strict separation from other people, including family members.

The app also allows you to track each suspicious person via GPS (Global Positioning System) satellite device. If it leaves its assigned confinement area, the app knows immediately and sends an alert to both the suspect and the officer controlling their area. The fine for disobedience can reach up to 8,000 dollars. The app also sends notifications of new coronavirus cases to the neighborhood or nearby areas. The objective is to guarantee greater control of the virus by knowing, at all times, where both the infected citizens and those in quarantine are located[46].

In Singapore, a highly-surveilled nation, the state Technology Agency and the Ministry of Health launched a much the same app last March: TraceTogether, a mobile phone app that can retrospectively identify all of a person's close contacts and notify them if a family member, friend or acquaintance contracted the virus. Citizens can be tracked through a sophisticated combination of security camera footage, telephone geolocation and police investigation conducted by true "disease detectives" with eventual assistance from the criminal investigation department, anti-narcotics bureau and police intelligence services. … The 'Singapore Infectious Diseases Act' makes the cooperation of citizens with the police compulsory by law. A unique case in the world. Punishment for indiscipline can be a fine of up to $7,000, or imprisonment for six months, or both.

China has also developed a similar application, HealthCheck, which is installed on mobile phones through messaging systems such as WeChat or Alipay, and generates a "health code" graduated in green, orange or red, depending on the freedom of movement allowed to each citizen (free movement, quarantine of one week, or fourteen days). In some 200 Chinese cities, people are using HealthCheck to move more freely, in exchange for giving up information about their private lives. This app has proven so effective that the WHO itself is taking inspiration from it in order to develop similar software called MyHealth.

This « South Korean model », adopted by these countries and also by Hong Kong and Taiwan[47], is based on the massive use of data and associated with various « video protection » systems. Until recently it would have seemed dystopian and futuristic to us, but it is already being imitated equally in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Spain and other Western democracies.

It must be said that, for a few years, some States and the large private mobile phone operators have stored billions of data and know exactly where each of their numerous users is. Google and Facebook have also kept mountains of data that could be used, under the pretext of the pandemic, for mass intrusive surveillance. And also, dating applications with urban coordinates, such as Happn or Tinder, could now be used to detect infected people... Not forgetting that Google maps, Uber, Grab, Cabify or Waze also know the routes and history of their millions of customers...

Everywhere, digital control has accelerated. In Spain, for example, the Secretary of State for Digitization and Artificial Intelligence launched a 'Datacovid' program on April 1 to track 40 million mobile phones and control infections. For its part, the railway company RENFE will force passengers to give their name and mobile number to buy a transport ticket.

In Italy, the main mobile phone and Internet providers have decided to share the sensitive but anonymous data of their customers with the Working Group for the prevention of the epidemic formed in the Ministry of Science and Innovation. In the Lombardy region, GPS geolocation is used in cooperation also with mobile phone operators. People's movements are anonymously tracked. Thus it was possible to verify that, despite the confinement measures, displacements had only been reduced by 60%... Much less than expected.

In Israel, the government also decided to make use of 'digital surveillance anti-terror technologies' to track patients diagnosed with the coronavirus. The Ministry of Justice gave the green light to use "intelligence tracking tools" and digitally monitor infected patients, through the use of the Internet and mobile phones, without the authorization of the users. Although they admitted to “some invasion of privacy”, the authorities explained that the goal is to “isolate the coronavirus and not the entire country” by verifying who those infected came into contact with, what happened before and what happened after… [48]

In the same perspective, on a global scale, the two planetary digital giants Google and Apple decided to partner to trace the contacts of those affected by the pandemic. They recently announced that they will work together to develop technology that will allow mobile devices to exchange information over Bluetooth connections to alert people when they have been in close proximity to someone who has tested positive for the novel coronavirus[49].

Covid-19 has thus become the first global disease to be fought digitally. And of course, that gives rise to a debate, as we said, about the risks to individual privacy. Even some defenders of the cyber-surveillance system admit it: «The fact that the app geolocates the person and that, according to certain data, establishes a kind of traffic light that serves as a certificate to go out on the street can clash with privacy. [fifty]"

There is no question that cell phone tracking, even for a good cause, opens the door to the possibility of digital mass surveillance. All the more so since the applications that identify where you are at all times can tell the State everything... And that, when the pandemic passes, could become general and become the new normal... The State will also want to access the medical records of citizens and to other information until now protected by privacy. And when this scourge is over, authorities around the world may wish to use surveillance to simply better control society. As happened with anti-terrorist legislation (think of the USA Patriot Act[51]) after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Havens of cyber-surveillance, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and China could become the models of the future. It is in those times that a kind of coronoptikon[52] reigns, where intrusion into private life and technological hyper-vigilance become commonplace. In fact, a recent opinion poll in Europe on the acceptance or not of a mobile phone application that allows tracking those infected by the coronavirus showed that 75% of those surveyed would agree[53]. In this way, governments -even the most democratic ones- could set themselves up as the Big Brother of today, not hesitating to transgress their own laws to better monitor citizens[54]. The 'exceptional' measures that the public powers are adopting in the face of the pandemic alarm could remain in the future, especially those related to cyber-surveillance and biocontrol. Both governments, such as Google, Facebook or Apple could take advantage of our current anguish to make us give up an important part of our intimate secrets. After all, they can tell us, during the pandemic, in order to save lives, you have accepted without protest that other liberties have been absolutely restricted...

SOAP AND THE SEWING MACHINE

There is no doubt that geolocation and tracking of mobile phones, added to the use of prediction algorithms, sophisticated digital applications and the computerized study of highly reliable statistical models have helped to control infections to a certain extent. But it is also true that, despite what Byung-Chul Han affirms, this waste of futuristic technologies has not been sufficient and definitive to combat the spread of covid-19. Not even in South Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam or Singapore...

The relative success of these countries against covid-19 is explained above all by the experience gained in their long fight, between 2003 and 2018, against SARS and MERS, the two previous epidemics also caused by coronaviruses... SARS - which was the first lethal virus driven by hyperglobalization - jumped to humans from civets, another mammal sold in markets in China. Transported by globalized commercial flights, this microorganism spread throughout the world, reaching some thirty countries. During the time the epidemic lasted - against which there was no vaccine or therapeutic treatment - close to 10,000 infections were confirmed and almost 800 deaths[55]... In 2012, when those nations had barely finished controlling the SARS epidemic, the MERS, caused by another coronavirus that jumped this time from camels to humans in the Middle East.

Neither of these two plagues reached Europe or the United States. Which also explains, in part, why the European and US governments reacted late and badly to the pandemic. They lacked experience…While China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Vietnam suffered the cruel onslaught of SARS…And South Korea also had to deal, in 2015, with a particularly damaging outbreak of the MERS epidemic[56]…

Fighting these two new coronaviruses, in a situation of absolute urgency, and with no Western power coming to their aid, all these Asian nations wasted no time experimenting with digital technologies to curb contagion. They resorted to public health provisions from the past that epidemiologists knew well because, in the face of numerous epidemics, as we have already said, they had been used effectively since the Middle Ages... Perfected and fine-tuned since the 14th century, measures such as quarantine, social isolation, restricted areas, Border closures, road closures, safety distances, and contact monitoring for each infected person were applied immediately... Without resorting to digital technologies, the authorities based themselves on a very simple conviction: if by magic all If the inhabitants remained motionless where they are for fourteen days, five feet away from each other, the entire pandemic would stop instantly.

Since then, the use of masks became widespread throughout Asia. And dozens of factories specializing in the mass production of protective masks were created… Fever checks with pistol-shaped digital infrared thermometers became routine. In the cities of the affected Asian countries, it has become common, since 2003, to take people's temperatures before entering a bus, a train, a subway station, an office building, a factory, a nightclub, a theatre, a cinema or even a restaurant… Washing hands with chlorinated water[57] or soap was also made compulsory. In hospitals - as was done in the 19th century - areas were divided into "clean" and "dirty" zones, and medical teams did not cross from one to the other. Partitions were built to separate entire wings; health personnel entered through one end of the room dressed in protective suits and exited through the opposite end disinfected under the inspection of nurses...

The whole area of ​​East Asia experienced then, for the first time, what we are experiencing on a planetary scale. There, particularly in South Korea, some of the best post-apocalyptic films on the subject of sudden contagion were made then -and it was not by chance-: Virus (2013), by Kim Sung-soo and Train to Busan (2016). by Yeon Sang-ho.

With SARS and MERS, the governments of these countries learned to store, as a precaution, huge amounts of protective equipment (masks, face shields, gloves, diving suits, disinfectant gel, gowns, etc.). They knew that, in the event of a new epidemic outbreak, it was necessary to act quickly and aggressively[58]. This is what they did last January, when covid-19 began to spread. China was quick to impose strict quarantine. He isolated the infected and their contacts in hermetic areas. South Korea and Japan did not, but they all demanded the safety distance and wear hygienic masks. And they massively multiplied the screening tests.

The most paradigmatic case, in Southeast Asia, is that of Vietnam. It had been one of the countries that had acted most quickly and decisively against SARS in 2003. And it had learned its lesson. When the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 began to spread through the region, the Hanoi authorities immediately applied - with only six people infected - the strictest confinement and isolation measures. And in February 2020, they announced that they had contained the pandemic[59]. It was the first country in the world to defeat the new coronavirus[60]. All the infected were cured. Not a single patient died.

All this shows that, despite their importance, digital location and identification technologies are not enough to contain the coronavirus. In addition, the widespread use of hygienic masks prevents the effective use of biometric facial recognition systems. From the first weeks, China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore verified that, due to the massive use of masks and eye protectors, their biocontrol system using video protection cameras was not effective.

In other words, the spectacular technological supremacy of which we boasted so much, with our next-generation smartphones, futuristic drones, science fiction robots and innovative biotechnologies have been of little use, as we have already said, when it comes to containing the first shock of the pandemic tide. For three very urgent objectives -disinfecting our hands, making masks and stopping the spread of the virus- humanity has had to resort to old products and techniques from several centuries ago. Respectively: soap, discovered by the Romans before our era; the sewing machine, invented by Thomas Saint in London around 1790; and, above all, the science of confinement and social isolation, honed in Europe against dozens of successive waves of plagues since the fifth century...[61] What a lesson in humility!

SACRIFICING THE "TOO OLD"

These are also times of lack of solidarity. National egoisms have manifested themselves with surprising and brutal rapidity. Neighboring and friendly states have not hesitated to launch into a “war of the masks [62]” or to seize, like pirates, medical supplies intended for their partners. We have seen governments pay double or triple the price of sanitary material to get the products and prevent them from being sold to other nations. The media have shown how, on airport runways, containers of face masks were torn from cargo planes to divert them to other destinations. Italy accused the Czech Republic of stealing batches of masks bought in China and that made a stopover in Prague. France denounced the United States for the same. Spain blamed France… Asian manufacturers informed African and Latin American governments that they could not sell them sanitary material for the moment because the United States and the European Union paid higher prices[63].

In everyday life, suspicion and distrust have grown. Many foreigners or foreigners, or simply sick elderly[64], suspected of introducing the virus, have been discriminated against, persecuted, stoned[65], expelled... It is true that older people constitute the group with the highest mortality rate[66]. We don't know why. Some ultra-liberal fanatics have been quick to openly demand the Malthusian elimination of the weakest. A lieutenant governor, in the United States, declared: «Grandparents should sacrifice themselves and be left to die to save the economy.[67] » In the same annihilating vein, the neoliberal analyst for the US channel CNBC, Rick Santelli called for a 'sanitary Darwinism' and asked to « inoculate the entire population with the virus. That would only speed up the inevitable course… But the markets would stabilize[68] ». In the Netherlands, where the ultra-liberal Prime Minister Mark Rutte is also committed to “herd immunity”[69], the head of epidemiology at the Leiden University Medical Center, Frits Rosendaal, declared that «ICUs should not be admitted to people too old or too weak[70] ». Threats worthy of exterminator demons from graphic novels… And also absurd because, as a nurse explains: «Covid-19 is deadly. And I can say that there is no age limit. No colour. No size. No origin. No social class. or nothing. It will attack anyone. [71]»

Covid-19 does not distinguish, it is true, but unequal societies do. Because, when health is a commodity, the poor, discriminated, marginalized, and exploited social groups are much more exposed to infection. This is the case of what happens, for example, in Singapore where -as we have seen- the authorities initially managed to control the epidemic. However, in that opulent city-state there is a minority of hundreds of thousands of migrants from poor countries, employed in construction, transportation, domestic tasks, and services. The country depends on these workers for the functioning of its economy. But physical isolation is nearly impossible in those jobs. Due to their social status, many of these immigrants had to continue their jobs despite the danger of becoming infected... On the other hand, a law requires foreign workers to reside in 'dormitories', rooms that house up to a dozen men, with collective bathroom, kitchen and shower. Inevitably, these premises became sources of infection...

From those nuclei, the virus spread again... It is documented that close to 500 new infections arose from there. A single 'bedroom' caused 15% of all new cases in the country[72]. To such an extent that Singapore, an "example" of a country that has won the pandemic, is now facing a dangerous rebound in covid-19. The coronavirus revealed the hidden inequalities of society...

What happened in those 'bedrooms' in Singapore gives an idea of ​​what could happen in Southeast Asia, in India, in Africa, in Latin America, and in resource-poor nations with embryonic healthcare systems. If in rich countries – Italy, France, Spain - the virus has wreaked the terrible havoc we know, what will happen in some impoverished areas of Africa? How can we talk about 'confinement', or 'isolation', or 'gel disinfectant', or 'protective distance', or even 'washing hands' to millions of people who live, without running water, crowded into favelas, shacks or neighborhoods, or sleep on the streets, or live in camps makeshift shelters, or in the ruins of buildings destroyed by wars? In Latin America alone, 56% of the active live in the informal economy...

For its part, the planet's main superpower, the United States, has renounced, for the first time in its history, leading the health fight and helping the world's sick. In a nation of such wealth, the virus has come to reveal the excessive inequalities in health. The inhabitants discover a lack of basic supplies as well as the deficiencies of their public health system. Senator Bernie Sanders has long been demanding that "the health system be considered a fundamental human right." And many other personalities call for this change: «We need a new care economy – said, for example, Robert J. Shiller, Nobel Prize in Economics- that integrates the national public and private health systems. [73]».

Meanwhile, covid-19 is causing tens of thousands of deaths in that country. And the situation can get worse because some twenty-seven million people (8.5% of the population) do not have health insurance and another eleven million are illegal workers, without documents, who do not dare to go to hospitals...

In what is now the global epicenter of the pandemic, analysts are seeing an “exacerbation of health disparity.” Some ethnic minorities -Afro-Americans, Hispanics- are, in effect, having a fatality rate against the coronavirus that is much higher than their social representativeness. In New York, for example, African Americans and Latinos make up 51% of the population, but accumulate 62% of deaths from covid-19. In the state of Michigan, African-Americans make up 14% of the population, but account for 33% of those infected and 41% of the deaths. In Chicago, Afro-descendants are 30% of the population, but represent 72% of the deaths... "Some figures that leave you breathless..." said Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago[74].

In a country where testing to see if someone is positive for the new coronavirus costs $35,000[75], health is often a reflection of social inequality. Savage capitalism does not care about the pain of the poor. If Latinos and African-Americans are, in the United States, more vulnerable to the coronavirus, it is because they are victims of a series of social disadvantages. They are also minorities who, because they have historically had less access to health services, frequently suffer from a series of serious pathologies: "We have always known," explains Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of United States - that diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity and asthma disproportionately affect minority populations, particularly African-Americans.[76] »

Despite the scourge of covid-19, some employers have continued to demand that workers return to their jobs to save the economy. Latinos and African Americans therefore have to continue working on the streets, doing some of the toughest jobs, cleaning buildings, driving buses, disinfecting hospitals, tending supermarkets, driving taxis, delivering packages, etc. Added to the risk of infection they face in their marginalized neighborhoods are the dangers they face on public transport and in their jobs... As for illegal and undocumented immigrants, harassed by the authorities, they do not go to health services, as they already do. we said, for fear of being arrested...

Every day of this plague, people are more convinced that it is the State, and not the market, that saves. “This crisis –explains Noam Chomsky- is the umpteenth example of market failure. And also an example of the reality of the threat of an environmental catastrophe. The neoliberal assault has left hospitals starved of resources. Hospital beds were abolished in the name of 'economic efficiency'... The US government and pharmaceutical multinationals had known for years that a pandemic was highly likely. But, since preparing for it was not good for business, nothing was done.[77]» For his part, the French philosopher Edgar Morin states: «After all, the sacrifice of the most fragile –elderly, sick - It is functional to a logic of natural selection. As in the world of the market, the one who can't stand the competition is destined to perish. Creating a truly humane society means opposing such social Darwinism at all costs. »

HEROES OF OUR TIME

The pandemic also has its heroes and its martyrs. And in this fight, the warriors who have risen to the front lines, to the outposts to face the lethal SARS-CoV-2 have been the doctors, nurses, auxiliary personnel and other health workers who have become unwitting protagonists, winning praise and applause from the balconies, squares and streets of cities around the world. Almost all of them public officials, for whom the health of the population is not a commodity but a basic need, a human right.

They will go down in history, exhausted, exhausted, for their dedication to the daily work of fighting the infection and saving lives. Often, they have faced the contagious virus without masks, gowns, or protective equipment… «We march to war without weapons! » denounced a veteran nurse from Guayaquil, in Ecuador, furious at the contagion of eighty colleagues and the death of five others…[78]

Healthcare workers are, in effect, risking their own lives. According to the US Centers for Disease Control, between 10% and 20% of all those infected with coronavirus are healthcare workers. Many are dying. Someday, when this nightmare fades, we will have to erect monuments to those white-coated martyrs. To forever remember his courage, his selflessness, his humanity. Surely when Albert Camus said that «the plague teaches us that there are more things in men worthy of admiration than of contempt[79]», he was thinking of them.

In this regard, a small country, also worthy of admiration, has distinguished itself by its altruism and generosity. It's about Cuba. Besieged and blocked for sixty years by the United States and also subjected by Washington to brutal unilateral coercive measures, the island was the first to come to the aid of China when this pandemic broke out. Since then, the Cuban authorities have not stopped sending brigades of doctors and health personnel to combat covid-19 to some twenty countries[80], responding to the anguished requests of their governments. Among them three from rich Europe: Italy, France and Andorra[81]. These International Brigades of Specialized Doctors in Disaster Situations and Serious Epidemics have existed since the 1960s. In 2005, they took the name of "Henry Reeve" -an American brigadier who fought and died for Cuban independence-, on the occasion of the passage of Hurricane Katrina across the southern United States[82].

The world is discovering what the mainstream international media has tried to hide until now, that Cuba is a medical superpower[83] with more than 30,000 doctors and nurses deployed in 66 nations[84]. All this obeying a humanist and visionary slogan of Fidel Castro formulated with these words: «One day I said that we could not and would never carry out preventive and surprise attacks against any dark corner of the world; but that, on the other hand, our country was capable of sending the doctors that were needed to the darkest corners of the world. Doctors and not bombs, doctors and not smart weapons. [85]» Havana is also providing its antiviral drug Recombinant Interferon Alpha-2B developed by its scientists in its biotechnology laboratories, and whose use would prevent aggravation and complications in patients infected with the new coronavirus.

APOTHEOSIS OF DISINFORMATION

The big media silence Cuba's medical solidarity while they carry out universal and permanent coverage of the pandemic like never before. For months, without respite, the main media around the planet have told us about a single topic: the coronavirus. Overinformation to the thousandth power. A choral, hypermediatic[86] phenomenon of such global magnitude had never occurred before. Not when the Berlin Wall fell, nor with the attacks on the twin towers in New York...

At the same time, we are witnessing a fierce war between various factions to impose a dominant narrative on this crisis[87]. Which causes a true epidemic of fake news and post-truths. The WHO has defined this phenomenon as an infodemic, a pandemic of info-falsehoods. The fear of covid-19 as well as the desire to be overinformed and the desire to understand everything related to the plague have created the conditions for a perfect storm of toxic news. These have spread with equal or greater speed than the new virus. Mountains of lies have circulated through social networks. Mobile messaging systems have become veritable continuous factories of lies, hoaxes and deception. In some countries, it is estimated that 88% of people who used social networks to learn about SARS-CoV-2 were infected by fake news[88].

It is known that fake news spreads ten times faster than the real ones; and that, even denied, survive on the networks because they continue to be shared without any control. Many of them are prepared with impressive professionalism: impeccable texts, perfect writing inspired by the most respected reference media, very careful images, high-quality sound, deep and moderate voice-over commentary, nervous and addictive editing and editing, captivating music … Everything must give an impression of seriousness, respectability, solvency… It is the guarantee of credibility, essential to prop up the deception. And for users to viralize it...

We must not forget that, during this interminable quarantine, in a context of uncertainty and emotion, and given the real need for everyone to understand the plague and understand it with arguments, two ingredients combined with each other have favored the powerful irradiation of the lies. On the one hand, familiarity, trust between people who share information in the same network. On the other hand, repetition, the reiteration of messages of the same matrix. If someone I know sends me information, and if I receive that same information or very close versions of that information through various other channels, I will think that it is credible and that it is true. Because I trust the source, and because other sources agree and confirm it. Instinctively I will even deduce that, through these two mechanisms (closeness and repetition), the authenticity of the information is verified. However, it can be false. In other words, all fake news will try to respect both requirements to better hide or disguise its falsehood. It is a law of media intoxication: any manipulation of public opinion through false news must obey these protocols.

It is not possible to make an exhaustive list of the fake news that has flooded our networks since the scourge began, but let us remember that various conspiracy theories began to proliferate almost immediately. The most widespread ones affirmed, as we have already said, that the The new coronavirus was produced in a secret biolaboratory in China (or the United States), and that it is a bacteriological weapon for the war between the two superpowers... Other equally crazy false news certified that SARS-CoV-2 was created by Bill Gates... Or that it was manufactured by China to exterminate its ethnic minorities... Or that the epidemic spread so quickly because the virus traveled in goods exported by China... Or that covid-19 is a disease spread by large pharmaceutical laboratories to sell vaccines … Or that 5G cell towers amplify and make the coronavirus more lethal[89]… Or that the plague was destined to ruin the export economy, rival to China, of northern Italy… Or that a vaccine already exists… Or that the virus has already mutated[90]…

Much of this fake news is still circulating, endlessly replicated by bot farms, profiles of thousands of accounts monitored by a single user. The goal is to display a "high volume" of messages, making it appear that many people are sharing or commenting on a topic, in order to manipulate the perception people have of that topic. Some fake news seems harmless, but others - particularly when they propagate the existence of a miraculous treatment or a magic medication against the virus[91]– can have lethal consequences. In Iran, for example, the networks spread a fake according to which methanol prevented and cured covid-19. Outcome: 44 people died and hundreds of victims were hospitalized for ingesting that methyl alcohol [92]...

With the general panic created by the pandemic and millions of people desperately searching their screens for information about the unknown coronavirus, the “disinformation bubbles” found a perfect ecosystem to multiply infinitely. Everything was also facilitated when -in 2016- the main social networking companies modified the algorithms for ranking messages. Since then, they have put communications from friends and acquaintances before messages issued by organizations or the media.

In any case, we can no longer be naive. And innocently believe everything that comes to our screens via social networks. In this regard, the coronavirus momentum is also a watershed. From now on, given the overwhelming amount of fake news, every citizen must be aware of the various verification platforms that are freely available to us: for example: Maldita.es and Newtral .es, in Spain; FactCheck.org, NewsGuard and PolitiFact.com, in the United States; or the #CoronavirusFacts alliance, promoted by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) of the Poynter Institute[93], which brings together more than one hundred verification platforms in seventy countries and in forty languages[94] ; o ;LatamChequea that brings together twenty media outlets from fifteen Latin American countries

In addition, there are multiple free tools on the Internet to verify the veracity of any photograph posted on social networks: for example, TinEye, Google Reverse Image Search, FotoForensics that allow important verifications such as knowing the original source of the image, whether It has already been published previously, what other media have already disseminated it, if it was manipulated and if the original was retouched.

To detect the fake videos that are so abundant, we can resort to InVid, available for the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers, which allows decrypting manipulated videos[95]. Also on the Reverso site - a collaborative project involving Chequeado[96], AFP Factual[97], First Draft[98] and Pop-Up Newsroom[99] - we can detect fake viral videos on the web[100] . There is no excuse to be fooled anymore. At least this pandemic will have served us for that.

TOWARDS A DIGITAL CAPITALISM?

Another communication consequence: with more than half of humanity locked up in their homes for weeks, the digital apotheosis has reached its insurmountable zenith… Never has the Internet galaxy and its multiple offers on the screen (communicative, distractive, commercial) turned out to be more timely and more invasive. In this context, social networks, mobile messaging and microblogging services -Twitter, Mastodon[101], Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram[102], Youtube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Snapchat, Amino, Signal, Telegram, Wechat , WT:Social[103], etc.-have definitively established themselves as the dominant means of information (and disinformation). They have also become viral sources of distraction because, despite the horror of the health crisis, humor and laughter, as often happens in these cases, have been absolute protagonists on social networks, a privileged link with the outside world and with family and friends.

We are spending more hours than ever in front of the screens of our digital devices: mobile phones, computers, tablets or smart TVs...[104]Consuming everything: information, series, movies, memes, songs, photos, teleworking, consultations and administrative procedures, online classes, video calls, video conferences, chats, console games, messages… The daily time dedicated to the Internet has skyrocketed[105]. In Spain, for example, since March 14, when the state of alarm and social isolation was declared, Internet traffic has grown by 80%[106]. Such a strong increase is due in particular to the exceptional consumption of video streaming, not only video-on-demand services, but above all the most characteristic communication phenomenon of this time: video calls via Skype, WhatsApp, Webex, Houseparty[107] and Zoom .

Little known until now, the Zoom video call application has experienced, in the last two months, a growth never seen in the history of the Internet... Since the pandemic began, it is the most downloaded app for iPhone. Last March, its daily traffic increase was 535%... World leaders have adopted it for their video conferences; companies to organize teleworking; universities to offer online courses; the musicians and singers to create, as a group, their coronaclips; friends and families to remain virtually reunited during confinement...

The numbers are staggering. Zoom has gone from having -at the end of 2019- 10 million active users to exceeding 200 million at the end of March... To get an idea of ​​what this means, let's remember that Instagram took more than three years to get that number of followers. Before the spread of the coronavirus, Zoom shares cost $70. On March 23, they were worth $160, that is, a total capitalization of more than $44 billion. The virus is global but its effects are not exactly the same for everyone… In particular for Zoom's main shareholder, Eric Yuan, who is now on the list of the "richest people in the world" with an estimated fortune of 5,500 million dollars…[108]

Another "winner" of this crisis is the very popular application among teenagers TikTok, which also registers a phenomenal increase in users. Created by the Chinese technology firm ByteDance, TikTok is a social media app similar to Likee or MadLipz, which allows you to record, edit and share short videos -from 15 to 60 seconds- in a loop (that is, repeated in a loop like GIFs[ 109]) with the possibility of adding musical backgrounds, sound effects and filters or visual effects.

The global quarantine is threatening, throughout the planet, the economic survival of countless entertainment, cultural and leisure companies (theatres, museums, bookstores, cinemas, stadiums, concert halls, etc.). On the other hand, digital mastodons such as Google, Amazon, Facebook or Netflix, which already dominated the market, are experiencing a great moment of commercial triumph[110]. The enormous injection of money and, above all, big data that they are receiving will allow them to exponentially develop their control of algorithmic intelligence[111]. To dominate even more, on a global scale, the digital communication sphere. These gigantic technological platforms are the absolute winners, in economic terms, of this tragic moment in history. This confirms that, in capitalism, after the era of coal and steel, that of railways and electricity, and that of oil, the hour of data has arrived, the new dominant raw material in the post-pandemic era. Welcome to digital capitalism...

ECONOMY: A BLOODBATH

For the rest, capitalism is going badly… Because the prospect of an unparalleled economic disaster looms[112]. The economy of the entire planet had never been seen to stop dead. The territories most affected -for now- by covid-19 are China and East Asia, Europe and the United States, that is, the central triangle of world development. Millions of companies, large and small, are in crisis, closed, on the verge of bankruptcy[113]. Several hundred million workers have lost their jobs, totally or partially[114]... As on so many previous occasions, wage earners lowest paid and small businesses will pay the highest price. Half a billion people could be dragged back into poverty[115]. This economic crisis, global in scope, is unprecedented and will exceed the depth and duration of that of 1929. It is also more serious than the financial crisis of 2008. The pandemic produces a general rejection of anarchic hypercapitalism, which has allowed obscene inequalities such as that 1% of the world's rich own more than the remaining 99%[116]. The excesses of economic globalization are also questioned.

The stock markets, with ups and downs, have sunk[117]: «It's a real bloodbath! », shouted the broker of a wealth management company[118] before the historical losses of his investors. Oil prices have fallen to unknown depths[119]. On April 20, in the Chicago raw materials market, the reference barrel, West Texas Intermediate (WTI), came to cost -37 dollars[120]... Yes, minus 37 dollars, that is, that the seller paid the buyer 37 dollars for him to take a barrel of oil... A collapse never seen in history... Which is excellent for importing countries: China, Japan, Germany, France, South Korea... But disastrous for exporting States highly populated: Russia, Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela... Another negative consequence: such cheap oil can delay the necessary ecological transition as this automatically increases the price of alternative energies (solar, wind, biomass, etc.)... The world economy is enters unknown territory[121]. No one has a precise idea of ​​the dimensions of the cataclysm. As Kissinger has said: « The current economic crisis is of unprecedented complexity. The contraction unleashed by the coronavirus, because of its high speed and its global amplitude, is unlike anything we have known in history.[122] »

The European Union (EU), for example, initially proposed a plan of 25 billion euros to help member countries. Then the European Central Bank spoke of 750 billion… ! Such a gigantic extent gives an idea of ​​the dimension of the confusion... It is estimated that the GDP of developed countries could collapse by 10%... Much more than in the crisis of 29... A brutal shock. Feverish, panic-stricken, governments practice a sort of “War Keynesianism”. They must help wage earners, peasants, families, companies. And they urgently unblock astronomical sums to inject them into the financial circuits in order to avoid the implosion of the economic system[123]. To also prevent, as far as possible, the coronavirus from ultimately causing more poor people than deaths...

But the cost will be unimaginable. With the aggravating factor for the State that its tax revenue will be drastically reduced. The deficit will be galactic. At the level of the euro area, for example, according to the French economist Jacques Sapir, the deficit will reach, by the end of this year, one and a half trillion euros (or 1.5 billion)[124]. The never seen. In the case of the United Kingdom -which is no longer in the EU, nor in the euro zone- the Bank of England will solve the problem simply by manufacturing currency... What neither Italy, nor Spain, nor France, which are the States that they will need more liquidity. And that they are already super-indebted... In these three nations, leaving the Union or the euro zone will be strongly considered. Because Germany, Austria, Finland and the Netherlands refused, for weeks, to allow them to obtain credits without any conditions (the famous "coronabonds")... When, in part, the problems of the health systems of Italy, Spain and France are the direct consequence of the austerity policies and cuts in public service budgets demanded by those four “austericidal” partners from the north. Remember that southern Europe, before being the epicenter of the current pandemic, was the epicenter of the most sadistic[125] austerity policies after the 2008 financial crisis. One led to the other.

Europe, as a protective union, has failed. The community club has been unable to respond jointly and multilaterally to the human and social drama that is beating down on the Old Continent. People -particularly the relatives and friends of the thousands and thousands of deceased- are not going to forget it. « It is an economic model soaked in blood -denounces Naomi Klein-. And now people are beginning to notice. Because they turn on the television and see commentators and politicians telling them that maybe they should sacrifice their grandparents so that stock prices can go up… And people wonder: what kind of system is this? [126]»

At such a tragic and delicate moment -with the first secession from the European Union (the United Kingdom's Brexit) recently launched on January 31st- and faced with such a crucial health challenge, the European dream has not worked. And it was probably the last chance... What fate awaits, after the pandemic, that European Union that lacks solidarity with its most fragile partners, and eaten away from the inside by populists and right-wing extremists?

International trade has fallen to its level of a century ago[127]. The prices of raw materials have bottomed out. Not only those of oil, but also copper, nickel, cotton, cocoa, palm oil, etc. For the economies of the exporting countries of the South -where two thirds of the planet's inhabitants live- it is a devastating situation. Because, to the collapse of exports, we must also add: the cessation of contributions from tourism, and the drastic decrease in remittances from emigrants affected by the general loss of employment in rich countries paralyzed by the plague. In other words, the three main resources of the countries of the South are collapsing... Millions of people who, in recent decades, had managed to integrate an incipient global 'middle class' are now in danger of falling back into poverty...

But also, in this not very encouraging context, capital has also begun to defect en masse from developing countries. It is estimated that from February 21, 2020, the date of the first death in Italy from covid-19, until the end of March, some 59 billion dollars fled those nations[128]. As a result, many currencies have sunk: the Mexican peso lost 25% of its value against the dollar; the Brazilian real and the South African rand 20%. And all imports, in those countries, will now be more expensive...

In such a gloomy context, the most foreseeable thing is that, when the pandemic passes, several of these States, weakened, ruined, indebted, experience strong social shocks... There could also be bloodbaths... It is also likely that we will attend, in certain regions, to a desperate stampede of wild emigration towards the North... Whose countries will be, at that precise moment, dealing themselves with the painful consequences of the worst crisis in their history. Needless to say, the new emigrants, turned into scapegoats, will not be welcomed... They will feed the xenophobia and hatred of extreme right-wing groups on the rise both in Europe and the United States... History warns that disasters encourage chauvinism and racisms…

To avoid such nightmare scenarios, many voices are being raised calling for the adoption of various urgent provisions. Among them, the cancellation of the debt of developing countries that, before the crisis, already had a very high external debt. And they had to pay, by the end of 2021, according to the UN, some 2.7 billion dollars in interest on their debt[129]... Many personalities and institutions are demanding a moratorium on debt payments in favor of nations most affected. Pope Francis himself has demanded that, "considering the circumstances, all countries should address the great needs of the moment, reducing or even canceling the debt that weighs on the budgets of the poorest"[130]. Also, in this critical context, the United States is calling for the lifting of the unjust "coercive unilateral measures" against Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Syria, etc.

DESGLOBALIZE?

The pandemic also forces us to question ourselves about the dominant economic-commercial model. For forty years, neoliberal globalization has spurred trade and developed transnational supply chains. The health crisis has shown that supply logistics lines are too long and fragile. And that, in an emergency like now, remote providers are unable to respond to the urgency. All this has shown that, in many cases, the sovereignty of States is very relative.

Due to neoliberal ideological extremism, the world has undoubtedly gone too far in the relocation of production, in de-industrialization and in the “zero stock” doctrine. Now, in a situation of life and death, many societies have discovered, astonished, that for some essential supplies -antibiotics, tests, masks, gloves, respirators, etc.- we depend on manufacturers located in the antipodes... That in our own countries manufactures very little... The "war of the masks" has left a very painful impression of impotence.

Since the financial crisis of 2008, right-wing nationalist and populist groups - to which, for example, the voters of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Viktor Orbán and Jair Bolsonaro belong - had already been expressing their rejection of economic globalization. On the other hand, since the end of the 1990s, alter-globalization militants, from leftist and humanist points of view, have also been strongly criticizing the eco-predatory financial globalization, and calling for 'another possible world'.

These two forces, already considerable, are now going to be joined by the masses of people discontented by the dependence of their countries when it comes to facing the cataclysm of covid-19. There is a feeling that, with globalization, many governments have renounced fundamental dimensions of their sovereignty, their independence and their security.

The anti-globalization pressures are going to be very strong after the pandemic. In many capitals the principle of an economy based on imports is questioned. Various industrial sectors will undoubtedly be repatriated, relocated. The idea of ​​planning also returns. The resort to a certain dose of protectionism no longer scandalizes. The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, a former banker, has ended up admitting that "our world will undoubtedly fragment", but that it is essential "to rebuild French agricultural, health, industrial and technological independence. We will have to develop a strategy based on the long term and the possibility of planning. [131]»

Instead of unifying peoples and encouraging their mutual understanding, globalization has favored selfishness, fractures and ultranationalism. The general closure of borders and the national withdrawal, in the name of protection against covid-19, are reinforcing the unilateral and nationalist tendencies fueled by Donald Trump from the White House and seconded, for different reasons, from other capitals such as London, Budapest , Brasilia, Manila, etc.

Since the reforms promoted by Deng-Tsiao Ping in 1979, the power that has benefited the most from economic globalization is undoubtedly China. Converted into the "factory of the world", this country is today the only superpower capable of counterbalancing the United States on the world stage. Along with the European Union, Japan, and South Korea, Beijing remains one of the biggest proponents of globalization. Especially since its accession, in 2001, to the World Trade Organization (WTO). The Chinese authorities believe that anti-globalization will not solve anything and that protectionism is a dead end because, ultimately, no one can export and everyone is blocked. What President Xi-Jin Ping has expressed in the following words: « Wanting to divide the ocean of the world economy into a series of small lakes well separated from each other, is not only impossible but also goes against the current of the history. [132]»

In any case, neoliberal hyperglobalization seems seriously wounded and it is not unreasonable to predict its weakening[133]. Even the continuity, under its ultraliberal form, of capitalism itself is questioned[134]... The need for a kind of colossal world Marshall Plan is also evoked... In any case, this tragedy of covid-19 will undoubtedly push nations towards a new world economic order.

LEADERS

Most governments have failed. Shaken like never before in times of peace, they have not been able to rise to the enormous challenge. Nor assume one of its main constitutional powers: the responsibility to protect its population. Examples abound of leaders such as Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, who, before being infected and hospitalized in an ICU, initially minimized the threat... Johnson initially opted for the theory of "herd immunity" , leaving the British population infected... Based on the idea that if 60% or 70% of the population were infected, that would work as a firewall and stop the spread of the virus. Until he understood that if "only" 3% of the population died, it would mean, for the United Kingdom, some two million deaths... Other leaders, such as Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil, continue to exhibit a denialist attitude and qualify the pandemic with giggles murderer of "unimportant little flu"... Perhaps, when the coronavirus is defeated, some of those responsible will have to answer before a justice similar to the Nuremberg Tribunal...

Many leaders have focused on providing local, national responses, managing the pandemic independently, without true international coordination. When it is obvious that no country, however powerful it may be, can defeat the pandemic in an exclusively local effort. The great powers have shown themselves incapable of coordinating at a global level (what a disaster the UN Security Council!) to constitute a common planetary front and collaborate in the search for solutions and collective solutions to the crisis. No voice – not even that of the Secretary General of the United Nations, the Dalai Lama, the Nobel Prize winners or the Pope himself – has managed to make itself audible above the general roar of fear and fury of this unprecedented shock.

If it is true that great historical leaders emerge in bad times, this pandemic moment of stress, confusion and lack of control has been characterized, on the contrary, by the absence of great leadership at the head of the main Western powers. The mess has particularly tested the mettle of some of them[135]. In particular, as we have already underlined, Donald Trump who has earned, due to his bad management, the distinction of «worst American president of all time[136 ]». For him and a few others, the new coronavirus has acted as a kind of Peter Principle, stripping them of their masks, exposing their imposture[137] and their resounding level of incompetence…

In this volatile scenario, other leaders, on the other hand, have shown a long-term vision, anticipation of events and the determination to act quickly. Two are women, and both are progressives: Icelandic Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir, a feminist and environmentalist with the Green Party; and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, leader of the Labor Party.

Iceland has followed a unique strategy in the world by offering massive and free covid-19 tests to the entire population. When the first case of coronavirus was detected last February, the country had already been testing for the germ in tourists or travelers returning home for weeks. Katrin Jakobsdottir and her government asked those who entered Iceland to appear at health centers to be tested even if they did not have symptoms. That proactive method of trying to identify SARS-CoV-2, even before it appeared, was decisive[138].

In New Zealand, Jacinta Ardern also made more aggressive decisions very quickly than in other developed countries, such as the confinement of her entire population for a month, and the total closure of the borders of the archipelago. Her objective was to seek the "elimination" of the disease, instead of the "mitigation" that was applied in many other countries. The idea was to destroy the curve, not just flatten it[139].

Many experts consider Iceland and New Zealand, along with South Korea, to be the nations that have best dealt with the pandemic. But we must add the case of Venezuela. Although the international mainstream media refuses to admit it, President Nicolás Maduro has been, in South America, the leader who most quickly understood how to act drastically against the pathogen[140]. Thanks to the battery of measures (confinement, border closures, voluntary house-to-house investigation, hospitalization of all positives) decided by your Government - and despite the illegal economic, financial and commercial blockade imposed by the United States, and military threats [141]-, Venezuela has been able to avoid the mistakes made in Italy, Spain or the United States and save hundreds of lives[142]. The "Venezuela method" has turned out to be one of the most effective in the world. The WHO recognized that the number of infected in Venezuela is lower, in Latin America, than that of Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Argentina, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Honduras and Bolivia.

Regarding leadership, a controversy has arisen over which type of leadership has better faced the pandemic, whether democratic governments or 'authoritarian' governments[143]. It is a false debate. In the midst of the fight against the virus, with masses of the sick storming the hospitals, and the funeral systems collapsed due to excess deaths, all the rulers, no matter how clumsy they may have been in anticipating the viral attack, have been daily on the screens of the media directing the offensive against the lethal enemy. Like a staff general leading the final battle. Nowhere has it been a 'democratic moment'. But the hour of firmness and determination. And that has pleased public opinion. Can it be deduced from this that the post-pandemic era will necessarily see the triumph of authoritarianism in the world? Is not safe. Many authoritarian leaders have been slow and clumsy in the face of the coronavirus, deceived, concealed information, or lied: for example, Donald Trump in the United States, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Narendra Modi in India, Jeanine Áñez in Bolivia, etc.

In any case, on a planetary scale, the new pathogen could not be immediately contained and cloistered in the area where it appeared. And those first days of indecision and bewilderment proved decisive. The germ was thus able to escape from its birth zone and, with unusual speed, conquer the world. Not even the most convinced adherents of collapsology theories imagined that all of humanity would be hit with such forcefulness in such a short time. Barely four months have passed since the moment (December 2019) when the first cases of this new infectious pneumonia were identified in Wuhan. And in such a short interval, the plague has caused a true systemic crisis and a questioning of the very meaning of human civilization.

The nightmare we are experiencing has already changed our societies. Disturbances of all kinds -inconceivable just a few weeks ago- are taking place in multiple aspects of social life, in interpersonal relationships, in politics, the economy, social systems of health, the role of the State, technologies, communications, international relations... Dozens of States -even within the European Union- have closed their borders sine die or have militarized them. Many countries and hundreds of cities have introduced a curfew for the first time in peacetime. Millions of people have given up freedom of movement. Democratic life has been completely disrupted. Dozens of electoral processes have been postponed or suspended. The most powerful Armed Forces do not escape contagion. They are withdrawing combatants[144], withdrawing ships and confessing that they are ineffective in this strange war against an invisible enemy[145]. The main airlines have closed their flights, leaving hundreds of thousands of travelers stranded in the four corners of the planet[146]. The most important sports competitions – including the Olympic Games, the UEFA Champions League, the Tour de France – have been suspended and postponed. Half of humanity is now wearing a protective mask while the other half also wants to put it on... but cannot find it.

What will the planet be like when the pandemic is over? The world is going to need authoritative voices, with charisma and symbolic force, that show the right collective path to start a new stage, as was done after the Second World War. The UN will have to reform itself and allow new nations such as India, Nigeria, Egypt, Brazil and Mexico to enter, as permanent members of the Security Council, more representative of the reality of the contemporary world.

With the failure of US leadership opens a dangerous power vacuum. The game of thrones is dangerously relaunched. The European Union, as we have seen, has also been hurt by its disappointing lack of cohesion during the pandemic. China and Russia, on the other hand, have consolidated their international role by providing assistance to many countries overwhelmed by the collapse of their health system. They have even helped the United States! We have seen unusual images: Russian military planes landing in Italy, offering doctors and distributing medical supplies. China has donated millions of detection kits, masks, pulmonary ventilators, protective helmets and all kinds of health logistics to a hundred countries. "We are waves of the same sea, leaves of the same tree, flowers of the same garden." beautifully said the containers that China has offered to much of the world. Beijing's international influence has grown.

FUTURES

All the countries on the planet continue to face –at the same time and for the first time– the onslaught of some kind of alien... The pandemic is going to be long. And it is possible that the virus, after mutating, will return. Maybe next winter… Given the enormity of what is happening, changes are coming. Although no one knows what will be the possible scenarios that will prevail. The uncertainties are numerous. But it is clear that it can be a moment of resounding transformation.

Things cannot continue as they were. A large part of humanity cannot continue living in a world that is so unfair, so unequal and so ecocidal. As one of the memes that have circulated the most during the quarantine says: «We do not want to return to normality, because normality is the problem. "The 'normality' brought us the pandemic...

This traumatic experience must be used to reformulate the social contract and move towards higher levels of community solidarity and greater social integration. Across the planet, many voices are now calling for more redistributive, more feminist economic and political institutions, and greater concern for the socially marginalized, discriminated minorities, the poor, and the elderly. Any post-pandemic response should be based, as Edgar Morin suggests, on “the principles of a truly regenerative economy, based on care and repair”.

The concept of 'national security' should include, from now on, the redistribution of wealth, fairer taxation to reduce obscene inequalities, and the consolidation of the welfare state. You want to move towards some form of socialism. It is urgent, at a global level, to create a basic income that offers protection to all citizens in times of crisis... and in ordinary times.

Health systems should be public and universal. Running hospitals like businesses has led to treating patients like merchandise. Result: a disaster both human and health. In any case, there is unanimity in calling for the covid-19 vaccine, when it is discovered, to be considered a 'global public good', and to be free and accessible to all humanity. The new coronavirus has shown us that, when push comes to shove, doctors, nurses and health personnel are infinitely more valuable than brokers or financial speculators.

It would be smart to also anticipate the next climate crisis, which could surprise us soon just like SARS-CoV-2 did… Stop raging consumerism and end the idea of ​​infinite growth. Our planet can't anymore. agonizes It is dying in our arms... It is imperative to accelerate the clean energy transition and rush to implement what environmentalists have been calling for for a long time, a "Green New Deal", an ambitious Green Deal that constitutes the new global economic alternative to predatory capitalism .

@bearkoda446 @TrainerTol I have a mixer app on my pc called voicemeeter. there are youtube vids on how to set it up. t… https://t.co/z06hrCgIgu

— BrittNichole Wed Jan 29 13:17:26 +0000 2020

But we must immediately avoid, as Naomi Klein warns, that under the effects of 'shock capitalism', the defenders of the system -ultra-liberal governments, speculative funds, transnational companies, digital mastodons- consolidate their domination and manipulate the crisis to create more inequalities, greater exploitation and more injustices... It is necessary to prevent the pandemic from being used to establish a Great World Regression that reduces the spaces for democracy, further destroys our ecosystem, diminishes human rights, neocolonizes the South, trivializes the racism, expel migrants and normalize mass cyber surveillance.

At the moment, entire societies remain confined to their homes. Docile, scared, controlled, silent. What will happen when the lockdowns are lifted? What have the peoples been ruminating during their unprecedented 'social isolation'? How many reproaches have they been accumulating against some rulers? It is not improbable that we will witness, here or there, a sort of unruly stampede of outraged citizens -very outraged- against various centers of power accused of mismanaging the pandemic...

Some leaders already feel popular anger rising... And after having adopted and defended the neoliberal model for many years, they are becoming aware of the blunders of neoliberalism[147], both political and social, economic, scientific, administrative... Now those politicians are promising their citizens that, once the pandemic is over, everything will be mended to build a kind of 'fair society'. They propose a new model that is definitely fairer, more ecological, more feminist, more democratic, more social, less unequal...Surely, urged by the situation, they sincerely think so.

It is very unlikely that, once the scourge is over, they will maintain such purposes. It would be a real revolution... And a virus, however disturbing it may be, is not a substitute for a revolution... We cannot be innocent. Social struggles will continue to be indispensable. As the British historian Neal Ascherson says: «After the pandemic, the new world will not appear by magic. We will have to fight for him. [148] »Because, after the scare, the dominant powers, however much they have faltered, will strive to regain control[149]. With more violence, if possible. They will try to get us back to the old 'normal'. In other words, to the State of permanent inequalities.

Think about what happened with the “Kansas flu” (wrongly called “Spanish)” pandemic that spread to the entire planet between January 1918 and December 1920. Who remembered it before the current plague, apart from some historians? We had all forgotten it... Despite the fact that it infected some five hundred million people -a third of humanity at the time- and killed more than fifty million patients...

And what happened next? Did Europe and the United States build the 'fair society'?... The answer is: no. The promises faded. Most of the survivors of the deadly flu were quick to forget. A cloak of amnesia covered the memory. People preferred to throw themselves into living life with an unbridled appetite in what was called the "happy twenties" (the roaring twenties). It was the age of jazz, tango, Charleston, the triumph of Hollywood and mass culture. An artificial and alienating euphoria that would end up crashing, ten years later, against the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression...

At that very moment, in Italy, a new doctrine came to power. It was destined to be very successful. Its name: fascism… Will history repeat itself?

IGNACIO RAMONET (Havana, Cuba, April 22, 2020.)

Acknowledgments My most effusive appreciation to my friends -Bernard Cassen, Lydia Castro, Camilo Pérez Casal, Miguel Mejía, Ferran Montesa, Marisa Ros and Sandra Sarmiento- who were extremely kind enough to reread my text -in such a short time and in the midst of the turbulence of this global quarantine-, to correct it, amend it and make me a whole series of original suggestions that allowed me to enrich the manuscript and, in my opinion, improve it considerably. Thank you.

[1] José Natanson, « The impossible », Le Monde diplomatique Cono Sur Edition, Buenos Aires, April 2020.

[2] Interview with Germán Velásquez: «They have privatized the WHO, private financing conditions their decisions», Cadena SER, Madrid, August 25, 2016. https://cadenaser.com/ser/2016/06/16/ society/1466079742_072124.html

[3] As of early April 2020, only 9 countries (mostly archipelagos) had no covid-19 cases according to local authorities. El País, Madrid, April 8, 2020.

[4] There is no (April 22, 2020) specific therapy that 'kills' the virus or renders it harmless as triple therapy against the AIDS HIV retrovirus achieves. Current treatments against the new coronavirus essentially seek to boost the patient's immune system to help them suppress the pathogen.

[5] Hugo Sigman, «The coronavirus vaccine can take from 6 months to a year and a half», Perfil, Buenos Aires, March 26, 2020.https://www.perfil.com/noticias/salud/ coronavirus-hugo-sihman-vaccine-may-take-6-months-1-year.phtml

[6] Yuval Noah Harari, « The best defense against pathogens is information », El País, Madrid, March 22, 2020.

[7] https://news.un.org/fr/story/2020/04/1067092

[8] Official name of the disease, attributed on February 11, 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO) and meaning: coronavirus disease 2019 ('coronavirus disease 2019', in Spanish).

[9] Means: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).

[10] Manuel Ansede, «Did the coronavirus come out of a laboratory? », El País, Madrid, April 17, 2020.

[11] Instead, patient 1 has been identified in China: a 55-year-old man residing in Hubei province was the first confirmed case of covid-19 and dates back to November 17, 2019, weeks before for China to officially alert the world.

[12] «China accuses the US army of installing the coronavirus», El País, Madrid, March 14, 2020.

[13] Clarín, Buenos Aires, April 18, 2020.

[14] Social networks in the United States have also tried to prove the (false) thesis that the American scientist Charles Lieber -a genius of nanotechnologies, professor at Harvard University-, manufactured and sold to the authorities China the new coronavirus. The arrest of Professor Lieber by order of the United States Attorney General for the District Court in Massachusetts, Andrew Lelling, on January 28, 2020, accused of having received funds from Wuhan University (WUT) for his alleged participation in the “Thousand Talents Plan” created by China to recruit expatriate and foreign scientists for its universities (which obviously has nothing to do with the coronavirus) served as a pretext for the fake news that has circulated a lot…

https://observers.france24.com/fr/20200403-non-scientifique-americain-charles-lieber-covid-19-chine-etats-unis

[15] "Republican senator: It's time to hold China 'accountable' for the coronavirus," Business Insider, March 12, 2020.

[16] «An Argentine TV journalist accuses the Jews of creating the Coronavirus», Aurora, Israel, April 3, 2020; and "Coronavirus: strong reaction to the conspiracy theory spread by C5N", La Nación, Buenos Aires, April 2, 2020.

[17] See: «The coronavirus and its hoaxes: 378 lies, false alerts and misinformation about COVID-19», Maldita.es, April 7, 2020. https://maldita.es/malditobulo/2020/04/ 07/coronavirus-hoaxes-pandemic-prevent-virus/

[18] Amparo Tolosa, «Delimiting the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus», Genetic Medical News, Valencia (Spain), April 1, 2020.

[19] Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2", Nature Medicine, 17 March 2020.

[20] Roujian Lu, Xiang Zhao, Juan Li, Peihua Niu, Bo Yang, Honglong Wu et al., "Genomic characterization and epidemiology of 2019 novel coronavirus: implications for virus origins and receptor binding", The Lancet, London , 30 January 2020.

[21] Helen Briggs, "Coronavirus: the noose tightening on the pangolin as a likely transmitter of the pathogen that causes covid-19", BBC News, 27 March 2020.

[22] Read the excellent study by Artur Galocha and Nuño Domínguez, «This is how the coronavirus infects», El País, Madrid, March 11, 2020.

[23] El País, Madrid, March 14, 2020.

[24] Read the two fundamental articles by Tomás Pueyo, «Coronavirus: Why we have to act now» and «Coronavirus: the hammer and the dance», Page 12, Buenos Aires, respectively March 16 and 21, 2020.

[25] El Periódico, Barcelona, ​​March 26, 2020.

[26] CNN in Spanish, Atlanta, April 3, 2020. https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/2020/04/03/altos-funcionarios-del-gobierno-trump-dijeron-el-ano-pasado- that-the-threat-of-a-pandemic-worried-them/

[27] Caused by the H5N1 virus that also caused the 1997 Hong Kong flu and the 1918 Kansas or “Spanish” flu and its 50 to 100 million deaths.

[28] Read Ignacio Ramonet, « The culprits of swine flu », Le Monde diplomatique in Spanish, Valencia (Spain), July 2009.

[29] Read the full text of the report: https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/94769/2008_11_Global_Trends_2025.pdf

[30] Ken Klippenstein, "Military Knew Years Ago That a Coronavirus Was Coming", The Nation, New York, April 1, 2020.

[31] The Washington Post, Washington, May 10, 2018.

[32] El País, Madrid, March 31, 2020.

[33] In the foreword to the document titled "A World in Danger: Annual Report on Global Preparedness for Health Emergencies," produced by top-level epidemiologists and scientists from around the world, and signed by Gro Harlem-Brundtland , former director general of the WHO, and Elhadj As Sy, Secretary General of the International Red Cross. https://apps.who.int/gpmb/assets/annual_report/GPMB_Annual_Report_Spanish.pdf

[34] Vincent C. C. Cheng, Susanna K. P. Lau, Patrick C. Y. Woo, and Kwok Yung Yuen, University of Hong Kong, "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus as an Agent of Emerging and Reemerging Infection," Clinical Microbiology Reviews, Washington , October 2007.

[35]https://www.investigacionyciencia.es/blogs/medicina-y-biologia/27/posts/en-2007-la-ciencia-predijo-esta-pandemia-nadie-hizo-caso-18485

[36] Statement on December 2, 2014, during his visit to the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland.

[37] BBC News World, London, March 23, 2020.

[38] Debate, Barcelona, ​​2020.

[39] El País, Madrid, April 20, 2020.

[40] Darío Aranda, « The ecological dimension of pandemics », Page 12, Buenos Aires, March 30, 2020.

[41] The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), China's highest legislative body, took the decision on February 24 to fully ban the illegal trade and consumption of wild animals, as a measure to protect the life and health of the population. Xinhua news agency cable, Beijing, February 24, 2020.

[42] Byung-Chul Han, «The viral emergency and the world of tomorrow», El País, Madrid, March 22, 2020.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Science Magazine, 22 March 2020. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/cellphone-tracking-could-help-stem-spread-coronavirus-privacy-price

[45] Evgeny Morozov, The madness of technological solutionism, Intellectual key, Madrid, 2014.

[46] Max S. Kim, "The app that monitors people in coronavirus quarantine," MIT Technology Review, March 11, 2020.

[47] « Taiwan's model against the coronavirus: rapid reaction, technology and masks for all », El País, Madrid, April 23, 2020.

[48] Russia Today, Moscow, March 15, 2020.

[49] La Nación, Buenos Aires, April 10, 2020.

[50] La Vanguardia, Barcelona, ​​April 2, 2020

[51] El País, Madrid, June 29, 2003.

[52] The Economist, London, 26 March 2020.

[53] https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2020/04/01/coronavirus-les-francais-favorables-a-une-application-mobile-pour-combattre-la-pandemie- selon-un-probe_6035233_4408996.html

[54] Read Ignacio Ramonet, The Surveillance Empire, Intellectual key, Madrid, 2016.

[55] La Vanguardia, Barcelona, ​​February 11, 2020.

[56] El País, Madrid, June 4, 2015.

[57] A hygiene measure first proposed in 1847 by the Hungarian physician Ignatius Semmelweis.

[58] South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, March 22, 2020.

[59] But that victory presages what may happen to other countries from now on. Because, on April 13, 2020, the authorities announced the existence of 265 new cases imported by plane...

[60] https://chaohanoi.com/2020/03/04/why-vietnam-has-been-the-number-one-country-in-the-world-on-coronavirus/

[61] Vicente G. Olaya, «Scenes of a pandemic from 1,500 years ago that are repeated today», El País, Madrid, April 11, 2020.

[62] El País, Madrid, April 2, 2020.

[63] Clarín, Buenos Aires, April 10, 2020.

[64] Read, "Some 50 residents of La Línea de la Concepción stone a convoy of elderly people sick with coronavirus", La Vanguardia, Barcelona, ​​March 25, 2020.

[65] Read, for example, La Vanguardia, Barcelona, ​​March 19, 2020; Europapress cable, March 19, 2020; and El País, Madrid, March 30, 2020.

[66] In Spain, 86% of the deceased are over 70 years of age. RTVE, Madrid, April 14, 2020.

[67] Dan Patrick, Lieutenant Governor of Texas. El Mundo, Madrid, March 24, 2020.

[68] Maurizio Lazzarato, « It's capitalism, stupid! », El Salto, Madrid, April 11, 2020.

[69] https://www.clarin.com/mundo/coronavirus-holanda-ancianos-debiles-hospitalizados_0_BV-kOz__z.html

[70] https://okdiario.com/salud/coronavirus-holanda-no-hospitaliza-ancianos-ni-debiles-5372513

[71] CNN in Spanish, Atlanta, April 3, 2020. https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/2020/04/03/opinion-los-verdaderos-heroes-en-la-lucha-contra-el -coronavirus/

[72] BBC News World, London, April 11, 2020.

[73] El País, Madrid, April 12, 2020.

[74] The New York Times, April 6, 2020.

[75] La Vanguardia, Barcelona, ​​March 26, 2020.

[76] Cubadebate, Havana, April 8, 2020.

[77] Il Manifesto, Rome, March 18, 2020.

[78] France 24, Paris, April 15, 2020.https://www.france24.com/en/20200415-the-health-care-personnel-embodies-the-hero%C3%ADsmo-against-the-coronavirus

[79] Albert Camus, La Peste (1947), translation into Spanish by Rosa Chacel, prologue by José Manuel Caballero Bonald, Unidad Editorial, Madrid, 1999.

[80] Among which: Andorra, Italy (two brigades: in Lombardy and Piemonte), France (in Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guyane), Qatar, Angola, Cape Verde, Togo, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname and Venezuela,

[81] Tom O’Connor, « Cuba Uses ‘Wonder Drug’ to Fight Coronavirus Around World Despite U.S. Sanctions », Newsweek, March 24, 2020.

[82] Hernando Calvo Ospina, «Une Internationale… de la santé», Le Monde diplomatique, Paris, August 2006.

[83] Cuba has about one hundred thousand active doctors, which represents 9 doctors per thousand inhabitants, the highest figure in the world (for example Germany, Spain and Switzerland have 4/1000; the United States, Israel and France 3/1000).

[84] El País, Madrid, March 22, 2020.

[85] « Fragments of the speech given by Fidel Castro, in Buenos Aires, in May 2003. », Granma, Havana, April 17, 2020.

[86] José Natanson, «Coronavirus and hypertelevision», Page 12, Buenos Aires, March 28, 2020.

[87] Fernando Buen Abad, «Semiotics of the pandemic», Granma, Havana, March 26, 2020.

[88] https://www.dgcs.unam.mx/boletin/bdboletin/2020_318.html

[89] https://www.elmundo.es/tecnologia/2020/04/06/5e8b67bafc6c83372d8b4649.html

[90] The virus is not mutating: the World Health Organization ensures that the virus maintains a stable structure. Variations in symptoms between affected people are associated with previous pathologies and the interaction of the coronavirus with them. Read Juventud Rebelde, Havana, March 18, 2020.

[91] « Hoaxes and false remedies to 'prevent and cure' the coronavirus », El Periódico, Barcelona, ​​March 17, 2020.

[92] There is a risk of death between 12-36 hours after ingestion of methanol.

[93] https://en.qwe.wiki/wiki/Poynter_Institute

[94] https://semanariouniversidad.com/pais/infodemia-la-pandemia-de-noticias-falsas-sobre-covid-19-tambien-cobra-vidas/

[95]83 https://compromiso.atresmedia.com/levanta-la-cabeza/buenas-practicas/herramientas-detectar-fake-news_202001245e2a8b020cf20ef4411cffec.html

[96] https://chequeado.com/tag/falso-en-las-redes/

[97] https://factual.afp.com/

[98] https://firstdraftnews.org/

[99] https://popup.news/

[100] https://www.infobae.com/politica/2019/07/13/fake-news-how-to-know-if-una-noticia-es-true-or-false/

[101] Rubén Velasco, « Tired of Twitter? Try these alternative social networks », Redes Zone, January 7, 2018. https://www.redeszone.net/2018/01/07/alternativas-twitter/

[102] Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram, « the four most downloaded applications in the world in the last ten years », belong to Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook group, according to « App Annie ». https://www.xatakamovil.com/aplicaciones/facebook-dueno-cuatro-apps-moviles-descargadas-decada-app-annie

[103] "This is WT:Social, the 'anti-Facebook' social network without ads or fake news created by the founder of Wikipedia", BBC News World, London, November 20, 2019.

[104] La Vanguardia, Barcelona, ​​April 6, 2020.

[105] El Periódico, Barcelona, ​​March 19, 2020.

[106] Cable Europapress, Madrid, March 21, 2020.

[107] Houseparty downloads grew 735 times during the last week of March 2020.

[108] La Vanguardia, Barcelona, ​​April 11, 2020.

[109] Graphics Interchange Format (GIF).

[110] During the pandemic, Netflix added almost 16 million new users. It now has a total of 183 million. El País, Madrid, April 21, 2020.

[111] Dominique Strauss-Kahn, "L'être, l'avoir et le pouvoir dans la crise", Politique internationale, Paris, April 5, 2020.

[112] El País, Madrid, April 12, 2020.

[113] « Coronavirus: “We are facing a generalized crisis of global democratic capitalism and non-democratic capitalism, such as that of China” », BBC News World, London, March 30, 2020.

[114] According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), 2.4 billion workers have been affected by the cessation of activity in their workplaces and some 195 million have lost their jobs, Le Figaro, Paris, April 7, 2020.

[115] Read « Oxfam: Covid-19 could push 500 million people into poverty », France 24, Paris, 9 April 2020.

[116] La Vanguardia, Barcelona, ​​20 January 2020.

[117] L’Express, Paris, 16 March 2020.

[118] The Wall Street Journal, New York, February 27, 2020.

[119] Les Echos, Paris, April 6, 2020.

[120] El País, Madrid, April 21, 2020.

[121] El País, Madrid, March 15, 2020.

[122] Henry A. Kissinger: "The Coronavirus Pandemic Will Forever Alter the World Order", The Wall Street Journal, New York, April 3

[123] « The US and Europe mobilize 6 trillion euros to combat the economic impact of the virus », Cinco Días, Madrid, March 26, 2020.

[124] https://www.causeur.fr/jacques-sapir-coronavirus-crise-economique-euro-175682

[125] Ignacio Ramonet, « Economic Sadism », Le Monde diplomatique in Spanish, Valencia (Spain), July 2012.

[126] https://www.elsaltodiario.com/coronavirus/entrevista-naomi-klein-gente-habla-volver-normalidad-crisis-doctrina-shock

[127] Le Monde, Paris, April 8, 2020.

[128] https://www.lopinion.fr/edition/international/coronavirus-monnaies-matieres-premieres-pays-en-developpement-pris-215333

[129] El País, Madrid, April 11, 2020.

[130] https://www.farodiroma.it/francisco-que-el-senor-permita-alcanzar-soluciones-practicas-e-inmediatas-en-venezuela-orientadas-a-facilitar-la-ayuda- international-to-the-population-suffering-because-of-the-serious-political-juncture/

[131] Le Monde, Paris, April 13, 2020.

[132] http://www.amb-chine.fr/fra/zfzj/t1693080.htm

[133] Read Marcelo Colussi, «Coronavirus, end of neoliberal globalization? », Rebellion, Madrid, February 8, 2020; and John Gray, « Goodbye globalization, a new world begins. Or why this crisis is a turning point in history », El País, Madrid, April 12, 2020.

[134] Read Slavoj Zizek, « The coronavirus is a Kill Bill blow to the capitalist system », [spherapública], March 18, 2020.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK “THE CORONAVIRUS IS A KILL BILL-LIKE COUP TO THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM”

[135] In Latin America, we could cite, among others, Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), Lenín Moreno (Ecuador), Iván Duque (Colombia), Sebastián Piñera (Chile)…

[136] Max Boot, «The worst President. Ever”, The Washington Post, April 9, 2020.

[137] Abel Prieto, The Naked King, Granma, Havana, April 10, 2020.

[138] BBC News World, London, April 10, 2020.

[139] BBC News World, London, April 9, 2020.

[140] https://www.telesurtv.net/news/venezuela-coronavirus-balance-segundo-dia-cuarentena-20200317-0026.html

[141] Read "US Deploys Ships Off Venezuela", Deutsche Welle, Berlin, 2 April 2020.

[142] Read «Venezuela, pioneer in combating the coronavirus in South America», TeleSur, Caracas, March 22, 2020.

[143] BBC News World, London, April 9, 2020.

[144] «France withdraws its soldiers from Iraq due to the coronavirus», EFE cable, March 26, 2020

[145] William Serafino, «Coronavirus and political storm in the Pentagon: The keys to an unprecedented crisis», Cubadebate, Havana, April 14, 2020.

[146] BBC News World, London, March 6, 2020.

[147] Atilio Borón, « The pandemic and the end of the neoliberal era », CLACSO, April 3, 2020.

THE PANDEMIC AND THE END OF THE NEOLIBERAL ERA

[148] Neal Ascherson, «After the crisis, a new world won’t emerge as if by magic. We will have to fight for it », The Guardian, London, 19 April 2020.

[149] Serge Halimi, “Right now!”, Le Monde diplomatique en español, Valencia (Spain), April 2020.