“Coronavirus, coronavirus, wash your hands, do it often,” read the pandemic jingle. My then three-year-old daughter graciously added to the rhythm of the song “Coronavirus, coronavirus, wash your hands, do it often, coronavirus, coronavirus, I will never give you my feelings.”
Later, one afternoon at the end of December 2021, my mother-in-law, my then four-year-old daughter, and I were about to enter the supermarket. Before we got out of the car, what has become a common discussion in some places began: the mask that bothers, that squeezes, that is loose, that bothers.
Trying to adjust it, I broke it. My daughter insisted: “I don’t want to go to the supermarket, I’ll stay in the car.” She was already crying and loaded that I got her out of the car, while she bought her a new face mask: “I’m going to get Covid!,” she shouted, while she tried to cover her face with her T-shirt. her. As soon as I put the new mask on her, she calmed down. Sure, that’s why she preferred to stay in the car! The children tell us little about their way of dealing with the pandemic, we adults talk about it with our peers, we have the conscience to assume what an event like this implies in the history of humanity, we know the risks, we have suffered the losses and we talk about it, cry, drink or take pills. And children? My daughter has spent almost half her life in a pandemic. She stopped seeing her classmates, she stumbled through the attempted Zoom class that started out cute and ended up being a disaster. Now the mask is put on and removed without having to be asked, washing your hands is not a topic that is discussed, and it seems that the minors are the ones who have best understood how to take care of themselves, until of course, the possibility of getting infected becomes terror .
That is the group whom the Secretary of Health, Alcocer, has decided not to vaccinate. Undersecretary Hugo López Gatell insists that statistically it is not necessary, few are infected, not so many die to make it worth taking care of them. A week ago I spoke with a person who had been in Mexico City for a health issue, his daughter, eight years old, a healthy girl who suffered an accident had to be operated on, they put several nails in her, one of them became infected and since she could not be treated in her condition, her parents transferred her to the city. In the hospital she caught Covid-19, she couldn’t get over it and died. The father returned home with his daughter’s ashes in a box.
The pandemic has won that battle, contrary to what my daughter used to sing, it has taken our feelings, all of them.
kg
Mexican journalist, host, broadcaster, writer and communicator
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Mexican journalist, host, announcer, writer and communicator. She hosts the program “A Todo Terreno” on MVS Radio. She has written for various publications and worked in different spaces on radio and television.