Bear in mind that the flu in Spain in the 2018-2019 season was attended in clinics and hospitals, discounting those who stayed at home and did not consult, 490,000 patients, with 35,000 cases requiring hospitalisation. Other very serious cases were treated in the ICU, 2,500. And, attention, 6,300 died from the flu.
I think it is clear that the phenomenon of the emotional plague has clouded and shortened the intelligence of everyone, including politicians and journalists, because they should put this epidemic into context. It is very likely that it will not kill as many as it did on that occasion.
This virus is likely to be less lethal than some flu outbreaks. It is transmitted in the same way and in the same places as any flu. It is a matter of following the preventive recommendations to the letter.
Why the collective panic
The human mind is the ensemble of the body, the cranial content and the external world that is now being put to the test. It does not cross our consciousness that, if the external world is a part of our mind, is a component of our identity, it has to be as stable, constant, reliable, predictable and understandable as possible; if not, our emotional stability falters. And we enter into survival mechanisms common to all animals, what we call panic. That is why ideologies piss us scientists off, because of their forcefulness, their ease of expansion and their refusal to provide scientific evidence for their verification.
I have given data that the flu, which has been with us since at least 1918, has killed many more people than this coronavirus will. What is happening is that, between politicians and the media, as well as social disinformation, they are creating a visual society, an addictive society where extremism, radicalism, the legal insecurity that is so present, and the ease with which dogmatists and perverse people find it to spread their toxins, create a base, a structure underneath the consciousness of collective insecurity. For example, those of us who do not agree with their stony millstones feel ignored and threatened with the certainty and categoricalness of their messages. We read very little, we have the criteria and opinion that comes from television and it is mediatised. The vast majority have no information other than that which comes from television and some social networks.
Well, and in this situation of constant emotional excitement, an epidemic appears and instead of giving the data that shows that the vast majority are mild and even that some serious ones are being cured, they focus on the number of people killed every hour, as in the war reports.
This epidemic of viruses, which since those viruses of the coronavirus species that appeared in the 1960s and have mutated into seasonal flus, is now reappearing with evolved viruses, but from the same family. Doctors now know almost everything about the virus and it is only a matter of days before vaccines appear. We lack very little data to know everything about it.
José Antonio Rodríguez Piedrabuena
Specialist in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis. Specialist in management training, group and couple therapies.