Nakkuse kütkes - Paolo Giordano

The coronavirus pandemic is a candidate for the title of the greatest health crisis of our time. Not the first, not the last, and perhaps not even the most terrible, but still.

It may not end with more victims than many other diseases, but it is already clear that SARS-CoV-2 is the first new virus to spread so quickly and claim so many victims globally. Other similar viruses, such as SARS-CoV, were quickly brought under control. But some, such as HIV, have lived in the shadows for years. SARS-CoV-2 has been more ardent. And its audacity has revealed to us something that we knew but could not measure: how closely and on so many levels we are all interconnected, and how complex the world is with its social and political, as well as interpersonal and psychological regularities.

We can say that Covid-19 is an isolated incident, a stroke of fate or a curse, shout that everything is “their” fault. We are free to do so. Or we try to give the contagion some meaning, to use this time better, to use it to think about things we don't get to think about in normal life: how we got here, how we want to move forward.

Paolo Giordano is an Italian physicist and a successful writer. His first novel, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, has been translated into more than 40 languages. The work won the Italian literary award Premio Strega. Paolo Giordano has a PhD in theoretical physics and lives in Rome.

Original title Nel contagion. In Estonian

Keywords:
Today
health