The lesson of the pandemic

We are now on the home straight (perhaps) towards a normality that has been lost for too long. The signs are there, even if we need to be cautious. The fourth wave of Covid, with its variants, has certainly hit hard, but the vaccines have been an effective contrast. But it's not over yet: there was no shortage of victims who continued to impress us with numbers that were always too high and distressing. The news reminds us of ordeals of suffering in so many stories of virus disease. Not sparing even the little ones. With the insidiousness of the virus, one cannot joke.

Covid remains a looming threat. It is still around and tries not to let go so easily. The normality we expect will come in small doses. And then it will no longer be the same, that is, as if nothing had happened.

In the meantime we arrive (or almost) changed in our daily lives. Many of us have faced Covid firsthand. In many families there have been quarantines of various kinds, with assorted and unprecedented difficulties. Many also ended up in hospital. We found ourselves crying relatives and friends. Isolations have disrupted family and social life. We have been precluded so many moments of sociality, for a long time. The same mask, which still remains an important and necessary bulwark, has hidden us a little from each other. A school of children or grandchildren (in any case of our new generations) was experienced a little in fits and starts and with many complications. A good dose of fear was also breathed in. Not to make it, not to stand up, to be overwhelmed.

All this has left its mark. I picked up on the radio a quick reflection of a psychologist who spoke of many young people who, with lockdowns, were tempted to "divest from their lives". In short, a worrying drift around the corner, to be taken seriously. We need to roll up our sleeves and do everything possible to get out of the pandemic tempered and unfolded. More and more it is time to give us a hand. Because - as Pope Francis often repeats - let us not waste this tragic experience in which we have fallen globally and from which we struggle to emerge. There are valuable lessons to be collected, to be shared, not to be snubbed. Maybe even reflecting on how much the virus has upset the beliefs of many. The no-vax wave, for example, makes us think. How was it possible to no longer understand the answers given by science and the possibility (indeed the urgency) of carrying out that "gesture of love" that was and is the vaccine?

Corrado Avagnina

NP Marzo 2022