ABC Editorial: COVID: Lessons and manipulation

Five years of the alarm state that Sánchez’s government decreed before a pandemic caused by an unknown virus has been completed. This act marks the moment when the Council of Ministers was aware of the seriousness of a disease originated in December 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan and that would end up causing a global crisis. Only six days before, some of the highest responsible had expressed their feminist claims marching in motley ranks by Spanish cities when many citizens already saw the tsunami of infections come. Until that time, the official spokesmen believed that only “a few cases” would be given and that the masks were not necessary. Then the confinements would come, the rupture of the supply chains, the forced digitalization of the company, the teleworking, the crisis and revaluation with applause of our toilets, the technological career behind the vaccine and the victory over the virus, officially proclaimed by the WHO on May 5, 2023. Those “few cases” of the winter of 2020 became almost 100,000 dead in January 2023, official figure, although it is estimated that at least 20 percent more for the excess mortality of those months compared to the prepazed month.

A five years later the vast majority of the promises that we would get lessons of what happened are still not fulfilled. There are organizations that have taken stock of their performance, but these are fragmentary works, which concern small groups. How far did our legal order run over with the application of alarm states (two of them were unconstitutional)? Did the confinements serve? Have the strategic reserves of equipment and medications that were missing? Have protocols been established that prevent the health workers from becoming the first affected by a virus? What were the side effects of vaccines? The list of questions is too long to wait sitting for life to put us again before a similar test.

Unfortunately, Covid-19 taught us that in many things we were wrong. It was believed that the level of preparation of high -income countries against a pandemic was very good, but when the emergency was declared early alert systems did not exist or were not prepared. Human resources in public health services were infradimensive and the National Health System lacked adequate governance. A credible and effective communication before the population was proved essential.

Not everything was negative. The legal and economic measures that allowed to safeguard labor relations (the famous ERTE) were a success. Doctors and emergency teams showed that they were at the height of a solidarity society. And science made a superhuman effort to get medications and vaccines in a record time, unprecedented.

Pandemia significantly impacted society. Promises were made to reorient and reinforce many aspects in the field of public health, but they have not yet fulfilled. And the main reason that things have happened like this has been the politicization of the different aspects of the pandemic. The political class has not been able to take out the different episodes that formed this crisis to judge them with a view height and with the aim of rectifying errors. The battle of the Madrid left – extended to the rest of the national progress, with special prominence of the government of Sánchez – against Díaz Ayuso around an alleged triage protocol whose application has never been confirmed is a good sample of this and a palm example of manipulation. The fact that the most famous corruption case left by the pandemic affects former Minister Ábalos, which was number three of the PSOE of Sánchez is not alien to this operation. Precisely, it is about stigmatizing the Community of Madrid, which faced government criteria and chose to implement others. Now, five years later it seems that the only challenge of Sanchismo is “winning the story”, which argues that the dead in Spain were because of the unconsciousness of that Sánchez’s nemesis that is Ayuso. The use of all public media for this, in addition to being ethically detestable and a fallacy, overshadow the debate of the really important, which is, as Sánchez promised, we left better of this terrible tragedy. But it seems not. While the left insists on drawing and using victims as a throwing weapon, it will be very difficult to establish with coldness and sensibleness what mistakes should not be repeated again.