Chronicle of a social management of the pandemic,
I remember when I saw in the media shortly after January 11 that Chinese researchers shared the genetic sequence of the virus to enable other countries to produce tests, I thought: good, that was just just an alarm, we can now test and treat a large number of patients before complications set in.
European and American researchers can work on the basis of results published by the Chinese, these are fairly classic tests, corona viruses are not completely unknown to us.
Then, we will organize ourselves, since we know that some people are more fragile, we will protect them, we will not leave them alone, for example people tested regularly will come to bring them not only food but also some moral assistance, we will do our best to ensure that their living places are respected when we propose to them if they need and wish to take shelter in hotels which are empty since it is definitely not the good moment to travel.
It is going to be a good exercise, we will be able to slow down the activity, reduce the traveling and the places where the groups are massed in order to preserve our meeting spaces. However, what is more important in a crisis than to meet people we trust, that’s what neighbourhood places, local cafes, parks, social centres are for. They are not necessarily places of passage, those of course will be closed, but they are associative places, they can be rather places of solidarity and mutual aid or we could organize points of information sharing and distribution of protective equipment and redirection to tests.
Yes, of course, care would have been taken to keep sufficient protective equipment in reserve to allow respectful and consenting interactions within groups of people you trust, so the issue of protecting others is changing, so is the concern of detecting the disease, it is no longer a question of participating in a large national movement, but rather of protecting those you love, support and depend on.
Of course we need broader organizations, but they should be based on trust. We don’t lack spaces to comfortably isolate sick people, there are whole buildings, whose inhabitants have left, empty in uptown areas where solidarity can be organised. We have an example in history, in the city of Florence in the 14th century during the black plague when all the notables were gone the citizens took back the control of the city, now these powers are controlled from a distance, they are drones and armed policemen, but they are the ones who limit our organization.
