Masks at the ready, hanging from the elbow, or from the wrist. Some carry them under the chin, as if ready. About to get on a bus, about to talk to someone vulnerable, about to put it back on if necessary because we still go into bars and shops with the alert mechanism activated.
One afternoon this week, in line at a cinema, no one is waiting with a mask on. A woman squeezes one nervously, waits for someone and the queue is already moving forward. To another she peeks out of his pocket. She is always there, if you notice, you just have to look carefully. Already inside, in the room, you can feel, like a vibration in the air, and then on the skin, the doubt of whether we are doing it right. Yes, you can now spend 140 minutes in your seat with 300 people in a closed space without a mask. You can also put it on, nobody prevents you. Today’s cinema is almost the same as it was before the pandemic, but no, we are not in 2019, when none of this had been real, although it was about to happen without our knowing it.
the seventh wave
The threat of the seventh wave is already here and that feeling of provisionality of now does not leave us. Social distance and hygiene should stay with us forever, but a prophylactic life processes emotions badly: a dinner and drinks with laughter and friends in a noisy place, a family reunion with children and grandparents and shouts and kisses…prophylaxis is not that. But we have come back upside down, like the first plunge into the sea after a long winter, as if we had been given a window of opportunity that could close at any moment, but we are not the ones from 2019. Nobody wants to say goodbye to a friend again or a sick relative forever through a telephone conversation. Not even by zoom.
And that feeling also orbits in our day to day without a mask. The WHO throws its hands up for the speed with which we lift restrictions. But how can we not cling to the pieces of life from before when we know that we are already fully in a spiral of epidemiological scares?
The “grab while you can” reminiscent of binge eating. Those of the tourists from the north who boil their skin in the sun on our coasts because they hardly have light in their countries, for example. Who doesn’t understand them a little more now, after the haze and bad weather season that surprised us in the past few months? We crowd onto the terraces when the sun rises again.
And we get covid again, and omicron is milder, and we telework or read or watch TV with a moderate headache, a pain, but not that of the first waves.
Related news
We intend to flu-like a virus that is not like the flu. It also hospitalizes and kills, but not as much. And their mutations are more unpredictable, more disconcerting. The scientific community still does not have the answers it wants, the counts of positive cases and global control have lost sharpness in a photo that no longer gives us reality. Beijing is again on the verge of confinement, Shanghai is prolonging its extreme measures, cases of childhood hepatitis around the world still have no clear cause and the impact of covid and the relaxation of general pediatric care may be behind the resurgence of these buds. Against childhood hepatitis, again, the mantra. Social distance, hygiene.
The migration of animals caused by the climate crisis, another of the collateral victims of covid as well as causing, threatens the emergence of new pandemics, indicates the latest report from Nature. The mask is here to stay, and whatever comes will find us on guard.