COVID-19: Are we heading towards a new normal?

Plas!
7 min readJun 28, 2020

By: Verónica Mesa

The coronavirus pandemic is still in full swing in most places. In Latin America, new cases continue to be diagnosed and statistics show a distinct failure to flatten the infection curve. Ironically, as the region now faces a more complex health scenario than at the beginning of the global pandemic, quarantine measures are simultaneously being loosened.

Such is the case in countries like Mexico or Brazil whose handling of the coronavirus outbreak has been erratic since the beginning. Now, they are lifting mobility restrictions and even allowing international flights in and out of country in the midst of rising contagion numbers.

However, it is not only the countries that were caught off guard who are struggling. Countries like Chile and Peru, despite having adopted swift measures to keep the virus at bay, have lately witnessed spikes in COVID-19 cases, which puts into question both the efficacy of the quarantine and people’s ability to comply with such restrictive measures.

Some cities which had been de-escalating quarantine have had to forcibly return to it after diagnosed patients continued to mount. Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, is a clear example. Weeks after “pico y género” had concluded (the city’s sorting system which allowed people to go out on certain days based on their gender — which was very problematic on its own), the mayor’s office was forced to declare the city’s the health system under orange alert due to occupancy of ICU beds reaching 54% of their total capacity. Now a new kind of human mobility restriction has been put in place, pico y cédula (which allows people to go out based on their I.D. number and entails yet another set of problems for migrant populations).

Even though Bogotá’s health issue’s foreseeable future may be a bit grim, it is still an example of proper preventive crisis management. When pandemics make healthcare systems collapse, even treatable cases can become deadly. Especially when bio-hazard items as face masks, hand sanitizer, gloves and soap start to become scarce.

This is particularly true in places like Maracaibo, Venezuela, where normally basic public services (running water, electricity, gas supply, etc.) are intermittent and medicines are expensive and hard to obtain. A significant increase in COVID-19 cases in cities with a decaying hospital infrastructure can only lead to chaos.

Healthcare professionals from Maracaibo’s largest hospital, which is also the largest in Zulia State, claim, anonymously for fear of being censored or punished by the authorities, that the situation has become so chaotic that the hospital itself is a dangerous place because of the high risk of contagion. Staff say: “Don’t come over unless you are dying, otherwise they’ll end up killing you here”.

So, why is it that when diagnosed COVID-19 cases are rising all over the world, isolation measures are being loosened at the same time? The answer is a wicked combination between “it’s better to let some people die than have the economy die” and “either way they are going to die, it’s only a matter whether it is hunger or the virus that takes them first”. So, under such a dark forecast we are semi forced to open up again. To open markets, lift mobility restrictions, get closer to each other as much as we can.

Even so, this doesn’t mean we are going back to normal. There isn’t some kind of return to a pre-pandemic world. The global quarantine has had too big an impact to ignore. We have to hold governments accountable for their mismanagement of the pandemic and have their tyrannies exposed. We have to remain vigilant over the special powers granted to governments so they could fight COVID-19 and ensure that they are used to help solve the crisis we are facing and not as an excuse to push forward authoritarian rule and concentrate more power in the executive.

First of all, we have to avoid thinking about the pandemic as a four-month issue, something that will soon be over. Thinking that the disease is near its end will only lead us to committing the same mistakes. Will there be several different waves of contagion over time? Will we have to commit to intermittent quarantines? Will we be capable to comply yet again with strict lock-up measures? We don’t know how the virus will behave in the future, nor what the human reaction will be.

In many places people continue to disbelieve the dangers of the disease because they don’t trust the institutions which alerted them to the virus, therefore they continue to unnecessarily expose themselves to infection. Both awareness campaigns and biosafety precautions (washing your hands, wearing face masks, etc.) need to be kept in place for our protection. On top of that, ensuring people’s access to water and sanitary supplies should be a priority.

It is necessary to plan medium and long-term economic policies to address the consequences of the pandemic which is estimated to leave 29 million more people in the region under the poverty line. Because of the quarantine many low-income and informal workers have been left without a job and no prospect of one in the near future. Contrary to what was announced by many governments, in some places rent payments were never suspended, public services bills weren’t subsidized and in fact they kept rising due to longer (almost uninterrupted) periods of time indoors. People come out of the quarantine with large amounts of debt because monetary commitments kept piling up while income deteriorated. Now we have to develop a system that allows governments to alleviate debt.

Basic income, that is income that is distributed monthly to people (it could be universal — everyone gets it; or partial -only some receive it), whether or not they are employed, needs to implemented for us to be able to overcome the economic debacle caused by the global quarantine. As opposed to subsidies or food stamps, this policy would cover a larger population which would translate to relief for people and an incentive for the market. For better or worse crises tend to lead to deep changes. If we want to seize this one, we need to make governments focus their efforts and resources where it can really make a difference.

We need to revalue care work and acknowledge the real weight it carries in both the economy and in the preservation of life. In doing so, we also need to admit it is frequently feminized, under or unpaid labor and start to rightfully pay it and create communal networks to provide it. By doing this we will not only be fixing a historical debt to a fundamental job that has been deemed unimportant and invisible, always in the hands of women, but it could also be an important step towards a care centered society. We need to stop believing that medical service should only be received by those who can afford it.

You would be right to ask where would the funds for such reforms come from? Raising taxes for the highest income sectors, removing inefficient subsidies, and reducing corruption are just a few of the places national resources can be drawn from to fortify health and care systems. On an international level there are financial cooperation plans to help manage COVID-19’s effects on the region, especially when it comes to migrants and refugees who are amongst the hardest hit by the quarantine. Neither can we ignore the solidarity networks that have been built between inhabitants throughout the pandemic.

The idea may seem utopic, but more than that, it is necessary. Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, reminds us that what we called normal a few months ago had some parts of the world literally in flames. That was the normal that resulted in dilapidated healthcare systems. That was the normal that gave us malnourished bodies unable to combat the virus. Our old normal produced this anomaly. If we continue with it, it’s only inevitable that the anomaly keeps repeating itself.

We can’t wish for a new normal and pretend to follow our previous paths, but we are doing it already. With the excuse of dynamizing the economy some governments are lifting environmental controls for massive conglomerates (who never really comply with those restrictions anyways). While we are accumulating more trash due to all the single-use materials we are using for biosafety, we have also started giving up on recycling. We keep abandoning the less fortunate to their fates. All of these are boomerangs whose effects will come back to haunt us in the near future.

However, this is not a call to inaction, nor to claim everything is lost. On the contrary, this is an invitation to be an active participant in building the new normal, a normal built up over the foundations of protecting life (human, animal, vegetable), health and freedom. It sounds romantic, but to make it happen it will take politicalcourage and we, as citizens, must demand it. It took a global crisis for the State to retake its original purpose of protecting its people. We can’t let it forget again its primal duty.

If the pandemic broke the illusion and stripped naked the cruelest inequalities, it is time for us to opt for new possibilities. For those of us who have spent more than half of our existence in crisis (governability, economic, environmental, you name it). it has become evident something isn’t working on a large scale. We need to demand better answers to the situation we are going through. We need to demand and vote for better governments, governments willing to preserve life over profit. We need to be involved, we need to think of new ways to connect between each other, and we need to question the status quo and take a different route towards a new normal, one that is more habitable for all of us.

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Plas!

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