All Our Fears in the Time of Pandemic

Ever since the global scourge, which we have recently come to know as the coronavirus, took hold, our lives and health are, they say, in the hands of experts. I have nothing against that – since I try to be a loyal citizen, and I have no clue about the challenges of modern medicine, I have no choice but to follow the advice of experts in an effort to somehow avoid the virus or at least postpone that encounter as long as possible.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to walk around with a mask and gloves, and I have to. Due to the nature of my work, I don't have the luxury of being able to lock myself in my apartment for weeks and defy the virus through closed windows. I am also not against the internal organization that my wife has preventively established within our private four walls, with her very pronounced sense for every kind of disinfection, disinsection, and deratization (viruses and bacteria couldn't survive in our house even in a biology textbook picture before the pandemic) – as soon as I cross the threshold and enter our home, a thorough and comprehensive decontamination awaits me, from shoes, through clothes, to my hairstyle, not to mention my hands and face.

Our skin has become sensitive from all the washing, so it looks like the material used to make those famous gloves, which have become an indispensable part of our styling in recent weeks.

Admittedly, if I were the Minister of Health or at least the Minister of Internal Affairs in that primary social group called family, those measures would certainly be far more flexible, but since the household departments are divided differently by a higher power, all that's left for me is to integrate myself as painlessly, conscientiously, and disciplinedly as possible into the prescribed measures of social self-protection in the family environment. However, no matter how much one tries to be loyal and believe in the institutions and the measures they prescribe, at some point serious cracks begin to appear in the understanding of the current situation. That unease usually catches a person late at night during the darkness of the curfew, it pinches and prods from all sides precisely when there is no opportunity to distract one's thoughts by talking to someone.

Internal dilemmas, questions, and anxieties erode a person as thoroughly as if they were Ahmet Šabo from Meša Selimović's novel, there are no answers, and the night is dark, long, and wide, with no end in sight...

Yes, the numbers show that institutions have kept the situation under control with various restrictive measures and prevented what medical experts call an exponential increase in the number of infected people, which we have been watching for weeks in Italy and Spain, where a good part of the nation has fallen like wheat because those initial priority measures, which we have, were absent there. But after the first press conferences, a worm of doubt began to creep into many of us: it increasingly seems that the authorities cannot actually stop the spread of the virus with these measures, and they know it well. Their primary goal is to prevent those who are destined to get infected from overwhelming the healthcare centers in ten to fifteen days, but rather to simply spread that influx over several months so that the healthcare system can somehow avoid a complete collapse under the burden of the pandemic.

Another, perhaps the most painful element of the entire coronavirus crisis, is not really a dilemma, but an insurmountable ocean of depressing uncertainty – no one offers a more reliable answer as to how long the pandemic will last. Some prominent psychologists warn that the breaking point is not far off when people become desperate because they see no end in sight, and in such volatile collective moods, the situation can escalate in various ways, none of which are positive. People have already lost faith in claims that the next two weeks are critical because such forecasts are repeated week after week, and there is no resolution in sight.

We can try as hard as we want to unquestioningly accept the half-explanations and the mass of numbers we hear every day, but a lot gnaws at a person inside when they sense that there are no real explanations. And there aren't... We haven't even managed to clarify whether masks and gloves really help us, as some claim, or whether they do more harm than good, as can be heard from other circles within the same profession, and other very worrying dilemmas have already jumped on our necks. It hasn't even been five or six days since those from the competent institutions told us praises about those decontaminating, disinfecting tunnels (which appeared overnight in front of numerous institutions), and they have already started to withdraw them. They say it hasn't been determined whether they harm human health.

In other words, we have a simple choice – to be crushed by the coronavirus or to preempt it by being destroyed by the toxic substances from those chemicals that are supposed to protect us from the virus! It is not easy for an ordinary person, terrified by the scale of the pandemic, to listen to two experts from two entities, with the same qualifications, titles, and medical professions, brutally contradicting each other, and that too at press conferences that literally follow one after another. Does the virus live in a dead person or die at the same moment with them? Well, that dilemma, which could be of vital importance for many, especially for experts performing autopsies, has become the subject of unexpected mutual disregard among representatives of the two entity crisis headquarters. While one claims that the virus can only live in a living cell, and therefore dies with the person carrying it, the other clearly calls it nonsense, assuring the entire public that the virus can survive for days in a person, on concrete, paper, plastic, or metal!!! And how are we supposed to avoid it then?

In the spectrum of unexplained questions that will increasingly trouble people confined by isolation, curfews, bans on gatherings, and outdoor stays, one question is becoming louder, upon which the near future of all humanity depends. Have those who have recovered from coronavirus gained immunity? Just as numerous world experts explained that achieving herd immunity is the only real way to stop the pandemic, disturbing news is coming from Asia, which first faced the wave of the virus – the second wave, according to analyses, does not bypass even those who have recovered from the coronavirus in the first wave, which means that a person can get sick from it again. This would further mean that the story of herd immunity as a way out of the pandemic is a lie and that the army of experts trying to find a solution is facing a new challenge: how to prevent the virus from returning to where it has already passed? And does that mean it can return who knows how many times???

If it turns out to be true, then our future, all of us together, is very uncertain, and we can no longer predict or plan anything. Never before have we had the opportunity to confirm that old proverb in such a painful and direct way – knowledge is fragile... But we have certainly been able to convince ourselves of how persistent ignorance is. As if this entire planetary turmoil wasn't enough, people came up with the idea of destroying 5G network installations because every day, from social networks, from the kitchens of some pseudo-experts, and from suspicious portals, explanations are offered that the coronavirus is actually a direct consequence of the installation of this type of communication network.

None of these attackers in these destructive campaigns, carried out, of course, in the name of protecting people's health and lives, even thought to ask themselves a simple question. In the Middle Ages, as we were taught in school, there were no 5G networks, nor were there networks of previous generations, and people died en masse from plague, cholera, smallpox, and various other diseases caused by some viruses of that time.

At the end of World War I, the telephone with a two-wire steel connection had barely come into use, and the Spanish flu, a deadly disease spread by exhausted and bewildered soldiers who had miraculously survived machine guns, cannons, barbed wire, trench dirt, mud, lice, fleas, hunger, and cold from battlefields across Europe, took fifty million lives in one onslaught. When all this is added up and calculated, it turns out that the story about the destructiveness of the 5G network is not for ignorant people, no matter how much the conspiracy theorists, who are experiencing their stellar moments in recent weeks, try to present it from the perspective of an ordinary person.

This large and inextricable tangle of medical dilemmas and fears has completely overshadowed other fears that will emerge in a few months if tens of thousands of people lose their jobs, if even those who still have jobs lose their salaries, if a shortage of consumer goods prevails...

.... Well, he's really overdoing it with his pessimism and dark predictions, every sober reader will say if they manage to read the text to the end and if they don't give up somewhere at the very beginning. Perhaps it seems like an exaggeration, but we must be honest and admit: there is no person whose anxieties don't cross their mind when, at night, during the curfew, they lock themselves in the house and turn off the lights, and sleep simply won't come...