It already affects almost half the planet. In just a few weeks COVID-19 has become a pandemic, forcing unthinkable paralyses and confinements. Since then, a series of debates on the potential paradigms of a new normality and the urgency of another globalization have begun: In most cases, reformist rhetorics based on reflections matured decades ago in the counter-hegemonic intellectual circuits; in others, questions about the regulation of the latest technology and its role within a new social contract leave a breach of uncertainty as to whether we are on our way to a more solidary or authoritarian world.
The first studies endorsed by the scientific community allow us to conclude that humanity has been lucky. The pandemic is caused by a virus much more feared for its ability to spread than for its lethality. If many of us remain in quarantine, it is for no other reason than to avoid the simultaneous contagion of the entire population, in order to maintain the maximum normality in the healthcare systems so that they meet both the most serious cases of COVID-19 and their routine health demands. No government conditionates the agenda of restoring everyday life to the manufacture of a vaccine.
Besides demographic, urban, cultural, and socioeconomic factors, it has become evident that the intensity of the current social distancing and economic paralysis is proportional to the submission of healthcare systems to the rules of business administration. The limits of the all-acclaimed global dynamism, incapable of offering adequate hospital inputs to potential 5% of the population with the most acute symptoms of the disease, have become apparent. The inability of the wealthy areas in the Northern Hemisphere to deal with such sudden number of patients (Lombardy, Madrid, New York and others) only proves that these health systems worked perfectly well, according to their administrative guidelines. What was fundamentally wrong were, and continue to be, the market principles applied to spheres that escape their competence. Sweden, a traditional example of welfare state, considered itself ready to abstain from quarantine. In a few months' time, a comparison with its more cautious Nordic neighbours will highlight the global misconceptions of recent decades.
