Galarraga Aiestaran, Ana Etxebeste Aduriz, Egoitz

Text written in Basque and translated automatically by Elia without any subsequent editing. SEE ORIGINAL

The ephemeris

Galarraga Aiestaran, Ana Etxebeste Aduriz, Egoitz

in December 2019, the first cases of the disease that was later called COVID-19 appeared in China. on January 5, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) published its first statement on the new virus that caused this disease. on January 12, 2020, he published the genetic sequence of the virus, and on January 30, he declared it a public health emergency of international importance.

By then, there were also some cases outside of China, and the concern began to spread and increase. The confusion was great and, on February 3, 2020, the magazine Elhuyar gave the first explanations about the virus in an article entitled “Key words of the coronavirus emergency”. The virus was still called 2019 Novel Coronavirus, abbreviated 2019-nCoV. The key words of the article were: coronavirus, zoonosis, pandemic, international emergency, mortality and lethality, R0 number, antiviral. Unintentionally, we all learned perfectly well what each of them was.

A month later, on 11 March, the WHO declared the plague a pandemic. By then, the virus and the disease had definite names: SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. Four or five days later, the Spanish and French governments established an ephemeris that touches us all: confinement.

It's been five years since then. Unfortunately, we also learned this word perfectly and there was a lot of debate and discomfort in society about the consequences of the measure. Other measures and words that sparked the debate included kissing, distance, social conditioning, borders. I learned more words: PCR, variant, RNA vaccine, permanent COVID

Some of these words seem to have been left behind, while others remain current. There are still unanswered questions and unreleased knots. And there is a word as useful as before to understand the situation. This word is syndemia. In a syndemia, several crises converge at the same time, and because of the interaction that occurs between them, the consequences become even more serious. At that time, the newly created virus coincided with the existing social and environmental crisis. To fight the virus, vaccines were created, but for the other two crises, there is no laboratory solution. Serve to evoke and appreciate what the ephemeris have learned.