Flu in Spain in the 2018-2019 season was treated in outpatient clinics and hospitals, discounting those who stayed home and did not consult, 490,000 sick, 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 the phenomenon of emotional plague that has dazzled, shortened the intelligence of everyone, including politicians, journalists because they should put this epidemic in context. It is very likely that it will not kill as many as it did on that occasion.
This virus will certainly 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 question of following the preventive recommendations to the letter.
The reason for the collective panic
The human mind is the ensemble formed by the body, the cranial content and the outside world that is now being tested. It does not pass to our consciousness that if the outside world is a part of our mind, it is a component of our identity, it must be as stable, constant, reliable, predictable and understandable as possible; otherwise our emotional stability is shaken. 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 verification.
I have given data that the flu that has been with us since at least 1918 has killed many more people than this coronavirus will. What is happening is that, among politicians and the media, as well as social disinformation, they are creating a visual society, an addictive society where extremisms, radicalism, the legal insecurity so present, and with the ease that dogmatic and perverse people find in spreading their toxins, create a foundation, a structure underneath the consciousness of collective insecurity. For example, with the security and empathy that they crush with their messages, those of us who do not agree with their stony millstone wheels, feel ignored and threatened. We read very little, we have the criteria and opinion that is born from television and it is mediatized. The vast majority have no other information than that which comes from television and some social networks.
Well, and in this situation of constant emotional excitement an epidemic is presented and instead of giving the data that show that in the vast majority are mild and even some serious are being cured, as they affect, in the fallen in every hour, as in the war reports.
This epidemic of viruses, which from those viruses of the coronavirus species that appeared in the sixties and have mutated to seasonal flu, now reappears with evolved viruses, but of the same family. Doctors already know almost everything about the virus and it is only a matter of days before vaccines appear. We have very little data to know it completely.
José Antonio Rodríguez Piedrabuena
Specialist in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis. Specialist in management training, group and couple therapies.