Читать книгу Modern Epidemics - Salvador Macip - Страница 32

The organizational problems that aggravate the effects of a pandemic today are less common, but they still exist. The dithering of many leaders in 2020 when faced with the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic would be an example of this. Nevertheless, it’s been worse on other occasions. With the onset of the 2003 SARS epidemic, the Chinese government concealed the outbreak, thus causing panic in the cities because of lack of information and feelings of mistrust. The same thing happened in the early days of the bird flu outbreak when the governments of Thailand and Indonesia concealed information. And during the 2009 swine flu outbreak, even though the data flowed fast and clearly in most parts of the world, in countries like Argentina, the attempts of politicians to cover up the gravity of the situation contributed towards increased levels of contagion.

The response in Spain was not unlike that in the United States. Although it was the first country to recognize publicly that it had been hit by an epidemic, this didn’t happen until five months after its onset. By then it was too late to stop it. The only solution was to hide. People protected themselves by covering their faces with handkerchiefs and locking themselves away in their houses. The dead were unceremoniously buried in mass graves for fear of contagion, a task the army frequently had to deal with as the citizens were unwilling to do it. In the villages, churches were forbidden to toll the death knell in order not to further demoralize the population, and life was all but paralysed for several months. The government had little idea of what measures to take, as was demonstrated by the fact that the beginning of the school year was delayed in order to prevent gatherings in classrooms, but crowd-pulling shows weren’t banned. In Barcelona, even when the governor finally decided to cancel the main public events scheduled for that autumn, the Swiss founder of Barça, Joan Gamper, demonstrating that the threat wasn’t taken seriously enough, decided to ignore this precautionary measure and to go ahead with the first match of the Catalonia championship, with the excuse that it would be in the open air with minimal risk of contagion.