I am even surprised, not to say shocked, that some “experts in epidemiological matters”, make predictions of anticipation of what will happen when we leave this time bracket, in which we find ourselves involved and socially isolated, and if at the economic level we are almost paralyzed, at a psychological level we feel clearly conditioned by this so-called “pandemic”, without knowing it, nobody can explain to us, if the virus will undergo mutations that make it more murderous, or we will continue to live with it until medicine manages to overcome it or, like its predecessors, it simply disappears in a short time. And all of this, while our life seems to escape us like sand in a half-open hand. As Paulo Coelho said: “It is not the explanations that take us forward; it is our desire to move forward ”.
To sum up and conclude, it is not any “donkey like me” that can perceive these minds of inaccessible brightness. For, at this moment, when there is something invisible, that does not choose social classes, that is destroying entire families, that is destroying the economy of the countries, creating unemployment, misery and hunger, and that we don't even know if we are to prepare for a change of habits that lasts a semester, a decade or as happened with AIDS, at least a generation, all the speculations seem to me from the domain of science fiction. As a friend of mine said, “with people like this, the world is only bad for masochism.”
In the meantime, we live in days of uncertainty and distrust. We protect ourselves because we can be a threat to others and at the same time they are a danger to us. We live at a distance, but desiring the proximity of those we miss most. In these days of social detachment, ignoring what can happen or when it will all end and studies of all kinds and shapes will appear, for all tastes - everyone is an expert in anything - they are difficult choices in social networks or in the few newspapers, at any rate, it seemed to us that this study, (from the Institute of Public Health of the University of Porto (ISPUP) and the Institute of Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science) has some scientific credibility, perhaps because characterizes a lot of our own vision, “it seems like a paradox, but the pandemic that is paralyzing the world is causing less fear in the elderly than in the young, when the former are most at risk of life. Older people may not have immunity to the virus, but they seem to have more immunity to respond to this new situation. They make it more relative, because they have already faced other difficulties and went through several public health crises, such as mad cow disease, bird flu, Ebola. For the youngest, this is the first major threat and major crisis in their lives, young people are more sad and anxious. The way in which this time of uncertainty is reflected in the emotional well-being of citizens is different between generations ”, observes Henrique Barros, president of ISPUP, a specialist in public health and an epidemiologist
We have the perception that social relations will not be “as before this crisis”, at least in the early days. The mistrust we have today of each one, the distance we maintain today, the fear of hugging, kissing ... will persist for some time, at least until we forget that we have already covered our faces, where even the smiles we hide. And, because we have to remember, for many of us this situation appears to us as a repetition of the situation experienced during the period 2011-2015, “when the unemployment of children and the lack of grandchildren knocked on the door of grandparents, who at the same time they saw their income being stolen, fanatical and were classified as "gray plague". Not everything will be reproduced but all of this has happened. The story, however, is open, as we all know. What will happen next? I modestly don't know. “I know that I am nothing and that I may never have everything. Apart from that, I have all the world's dreams in me. ”(Fernando Pessoa)
