Faced with the Covid-19 disaster, a new responsibility

Editorial. What figure will be able to give the true measure of the calamity which has befallen our societies for more than a year? The enormity of the number of its victims? France becomes, these days, the eighth country to cross the threshold of 100,000 deaths from Covid-19, the fourth in Europe after the United Kingdom, Italy and Russia. But neither this hierarchy of disaster nor this icy figure, however symbolic it may be, will be able to account for the distress of isolated disappearances, the pain of mourning at a distance.

Unlike a natural disaster, which freezes a city or an entire region in misfortune, an epidemic is a tragedy that separates its victims and their loved ones, just as it blurs its overall perception by fragmenting it.

The magnitude of the toll will not tell either that of the indirect losses, all these invisible victims of Covid-19 due to the deprogramming of operations and medical examinations, delays in diagnosis and care. But, above all, this figure will not do justice to the colossal efforts made by an entire country, starting with its caregivers, to contain it. How many tens, hundreds of thousands of additional deaths, in France alone, if nothing had been implemented to hinder the progress of the epidemic?

Just watch, these days, Brazil bend under the ineptitude of its leaders, the number of its deaths grow beyond the sustainable, to be convinced: left out of control, the SARS-CoV- 2 would have struck much more widely than the 3 million people it killed on the planet, and the 136 million that it made sick, sometimes with forms as long as severe.

And yet, this current death toll is itself grossly underestimated due to skewed national balance sheets, either through negligence – how many thousands of deaths have gone unnoticed in the counties of the Deep South of the United States? – or by concealment – the official number of Russian victims is in fact denied by an excess mortality which is four times higher.

With all these shortcomings, the provisional assessment of Covid-19 nonetheless establishes a certainty: it is indeed a major evil that strikes most countries on the planet. On French soil, no epidemic had been more virulent in a century, since the Spanish flu of 1918.

It takes all the blindness in the world to persist today, after the sarcasm of the first few months about the alleged dangers of “Grippette”, to deny the proportions of the disaster. And all the bad faith of the time to equate the restrictions intended to slow down the coronavirus with the establishment of a “Health dictatorship”. In France, they have been applied with a finicky authoritarianism and a lack of explanation which has eroded the support of our fellow citizens. They were nonetheless necessary.

Danger of social collapse

For the time being, beyond the controversies, it is important to understand the consequences of this assessment and of the considerable effort that has been made to prevent it from being much heavier. Covid-19 has killed more among the most vulnerable populations, in disadvantaged neighborhoods, in overcrowded housing, among front-line workers. However, it is these very people who find themselves the most threatened today, with a youth who has sacrificed so much, by the effects of the measures taken for general protection. The freezing of many sectors of activity has added another crisis to all those that hit their relegation territories, where all the country’s problems have been crammed.

In the United States, Joe Biden has taken the measure of this danger of social collapse, in particular by granting, as part of a gigantic emergency plan, unconditional aid to those most at risk. This protection, unparalleled for decades, logically stems from the choice that has been mostly shared around the planet: to place solidarity above all other considerations.

In France, as in the United States, as elsewhere, this decision implies a new responsibility: not to be satisfied with repairing the immediate damage of this disaster, but, well beyond, to plug the gaping cracks that these 100,000 dead have revealed. within our company.