johnm94 - 4/7/2020 23:12

Translated this to english to share with you.

Reflection on COVID-19:

Author: Luis Fernando Ángel M.
Member of Bogota Chamber of Commerce

Several days ago I wanted to write this article, which will surely be the source of criticism, especially for many people who see the solution in staying home forever until the risks of COVID disappear and under fear of understanding that humans are mortal, that people die and that we have a virus that is here to stay and that any measure we take today is only to save time, to prepare ourselves, but it will not make the virus or the problem disappear.

Before continuing I understand the problem quite well, I understand the objective of flattening the curve so as not to collapse the health system, I fully understand that the problem of the virus is not its mortality but its spread. I had to read hundreds of articles from medical to financial to stay up to date with the situation and to prepare the lectures that I have been giving, so I feel that when I write I do it informed, although my opinion, like yours or anyone else's it is just one of many hypotheses.

This is one of many pandemics that humanity has had to face throughout its history.

Today a new pandemic affects us. It has nothing new compared to the previous ones except for a very deadly weapon: Social networks.

Never before have people been so fearful of death, but let us not forget to take into account that thousands of people die every day in alarming numbers of around 100 deaths per minute and 150,000 deaths daily, figures that when coldly analyzed make us see COVID is not the doom and gloom everyone wants us to believe.

But never in history had there been a pandemic in which minute by minute the dead, the victims, the cases were counted.

All the media, in all countries, are counting deaths. All networks are flooded daily with information in most cases without knowledge or context.

Never before has the planet been totally focused on monitoring 35,000 deaths, thinking that this is a scandalous number, without putting any context on the number of people who die daily.

To put some context to them I want to leave these numbers.

So far this year (as of March 25), 100 times more people had died of hunger than COVID, but many of us had no idea about it.

So far this year, 10 times as many people have died from diseases associated with HIV, about 390,000 people, but the world was also not in sexual quarantine.

Influenza to date has killed more than 100,000 people, 5 times the deaths of COVID, but we hardly know that.

1.9 million people have died from cancer in this quarter and it is a reality that we have to face day by day, You and I can get cancer any day but we don"t stop living.

This is where the comments come in: You just don't understand what a pandemic is! You don't know what is exponential! Hunger is not contagious, cancer is not! This can hit anyone, it can kill us all! This can collapse the hospital system! The cigarette kills whoever smokes it! Traffic accidents are not comparable!

And they are all right, BUT they all fall very short in their analysis and have not understood the context of things, their depth and effects if things continue as they are.

Many think that the economy is money.

Many think that the economy is the stock market, and some millionaires that play with money.

Many believe that the economy is wealth or an isolated thing that has nothing to do with it.

They have not understood anything ...

Economy is the basic sustenance. The economy is affected a little by the health system, however, the health system is the one that depends on the economy to survive.

Economy is having food on the table, it is who transports that food, it is who distributes it and who sells it. It is the farmer that produces it.

The economy is being able to go buy those foods and not starve.

The economy is that you have energy, water, internet at home and you can read this article. It's that hospitals have electricity, clean water, supplies, money for doctors, medicine.

The economy is that you can stay calm in your house, drinking wine, watching Netflix and post on Instagram #StayHome while millions of people in the world have NOTHING to eat today because they could not work, they live in a few square meters and do not they have Netflix to entertain themselves while quarantining, the only thing they are seeing is if they are killed first by hunger or COVID19

(And by the way I am in favor of staying at home, and I have respected the quarantine to the letter. BUT only for a short time)

If the economy collapses, many people will have no home, they will have no salary. Therefore they will not have food, they will not have a way to pay for a medical service and even less to buy medicine.

If the economy collapses we will have no way of paying the doctors or sustaining the hospitals.

The millions of patients who suffer from other illnesses will have no way to buy their treatments, or pay for their medicines or insurance.

If the economy collapses, healthcare collapses.

The economy I repeat is not money, it is the engine of the civilization that we know today. If we want to return to barter, if we want to live again without energy, with food shortages, without banks, networks or the Internet, well, only then can you say: the economy does not matter.

But please don't be so hypocritical of not thinking about the economy when you are writing from a Smartphone or a computer, with energy, with wifi and drinking wine and saying that the most important thing is life, when there are hundreds of people who are working there in a plant or a company so that you can have that energy and that internet. Or did you think that the hydroelectric plant is operated from a house?

There are heroes out there holding this economy so that it doesn't completely collapse. But there are also millions of victims who do not have their comforts and need to go out to work in order to buy a piece of bread and eat something tonight.

I am very concerned that panic is beginning to take hold of people and governments when the figures so far are not statistically alarming.

I am concerned that you are not looking at the full picture of the economic and social effects that a prolonged quarantine can bring, and I will mention a few:

1. If today we have 2.3 million starvation deaths in a quarter with an economy that had been operating at full capacity, could we calculate how many millions more are going to die from HUNGER now with the economy slowed down?

2. If, with an economy in motion, more than 10 million people die of hunger a year, what will that figure be with a quarantined economy? How many millions will have to starve to understand that?

But it doesn't matter ... finally, people who die of hunger do not have social networks, nor the internet, nor is hunger contagious, and hunger does not affect influencers, nor does the former president of Real Madrid die of hunger, and we will not hear about it.

Hunger deaths are foreign to us, they are not contagious, so on that side we are calm and the economy does not matter now.

I do not want to imagine how many millions will die of hunger in addition to this quarantine ... but I am sure that the figures will be much higher than those of COVID 19 ... they will not appear in the media because that is not contagious.

On the other hand, there are medical studies of the correlation between the increase in cancer cases and depression, anxiety and stress:

Studies estimate that the 2008 financial crisis caused around 500,000 deaths from CANCER due to the stress and anxiety caused.

There are also studies that show the increase in suicides and cardiovascular diseases associated with crises.

At the rate we are going and if the economy continues to slow down, the 2008 crisis, the recession, unemployment, will fall far short if we do not resume quickly, and that will also generate millions of deaths that are not being taken into account.

Unemployment kills, losing a house kills, the anguish of not knowing what to do in a world that has slowed down can be deadly and governments and people are ignoring the whole picture.

To date, the Coronavirus leaves around 82,000 dead and this number is very low for the economic, social and life costs that we will have if we continue on the path of panic and remain locked up for long periods.

Do we understand the crisis that low-income people are experiencing, the people who were poor before this and today do not even have the possibility of going out to look for the daily income to buy bread?

The social bomb that is brewing in some neighborhoods where people no longer have money, are no longer paying them wages, cannot go out to sell a mango or a popsicle to buy food for their children?

Do you think these people are going to stand idly by starving? No gentlemen, we are already seeing it and this will only worsen ... the situation of public order, thefts, looting and protests will be the daily bread and will worsen the greater the quarantine.

The deaths associated with violence will also have to be added to the balance of the cost of being locked up. Because when all this happens, many companies will go bankrupt, people will lose their jobs and many will choose to go out and commit crimes in order to survive, and this increase in insecurity will also generate many victims.

All of this that I mention here is only part of the economy.
As you can see when we talk about the economy we are not talking about bankers playing the stock market, we are talking about the basics and hopefully our presidents understand this soon and are not paralyzed by panic and we will start to return to normal.

And to finish I will leave my opinion, although irrelevant about what I believe is the most appropriate to maintain a balance in this situation.

Quarantine must be maintained until April. Longer time could cause serious economic damage.

In this period, governments must use all resources to prepare the health system, more beds, more vemtilators and train volunteers to attend to cases if necessary.

At this time, the greatest number of cases must be measured and measured. The solution to this pandemic is to carry out many tests, millions of them in order to isolate the sick and not the relieved or those who are already immune.

Special care should be taken with people over the age of 70, when we take up to protect their lives while others are taking immunity.

The education campaign should be continued and people should be made aware of the care so that when we resume the cases of spread, they will surely be slower.

Remember that this virus is not fatal.

The vast majority of people do not even have symptoms.

In healthy people under 50, mortality is already below 0.2% and with a tendency to get lower still.

Remember that quarantine does not kill the virus, the virus will still be there and will not go away. Therefore sooner or later we will have to go out, face it and many of us get sick to get immunity to it.

With this in mind we must respect the quarantine, prepare ourselves, but we must resume work as soon as possible, otherwise the measures taken to contain a virus will be much more disastrous than the virus itself and more when figures are really analyzed and it seems more and more that we are overreacting.
Hopefully the cure will not cost us more lives and misery than the disease itself.

We have to live through one of many pandemics, it is not mortal, but what is mortal is to stop living for fear of dying.