# 6 Coronavirus: living with the virus

I fear that “living with” is just a political slogan, an arrogance in the face of variants. What has been happening since September is not a life, and despite this fails to control the epidemic, with the risk of an overflow of a second epidemic. “Living with” means accepting, every day, the crash of an A330, 25,000 infected people, severe cases, long covid… Every day. An article in the Guardian recalls the many reasons why we must refuse to “live with”, and adopt a strategy of suppression of the epidemic, as very different countries have succeeded. Among these reasons, the elimination of the risk of a much more problematic variant which would pulverize our illusion of “living with”: a virus does not mutate if it does not transmit itself.

Living with it, at the rate of 400 deaths per day seems to me first of all a bankruptcy of our system, while we have vaccines, and also how do Thailand, Australia, New Zealand for example, which them the have stopped ?! In addition, as it was very well described in the show of La Terre au carré on Tuesday, we have created the conditions for an “epidemic of pandemics” and would it not be our Western way of life that is to be rethought? in general ?

Shouldn’t we start by de-dramatizing? I am thinking of other pandemics in the past (Spanish flu, Hong Kong flu, etc.) which have been largely as deadly but have not led to the media hysteria that we are witnessing today.

Thank you for your broadcasts, wouldn’t it be desirable to reopen places of culture and life (bar restaurants, etc.) to overcome this general depression? Anyway in our daily life, at work, we carry out our jobs exactly as before the crisis, paying more attention to hygiene, but for the rest our actions are the same !!! People who know they are more fragile are naturally more careful, so do we need to be infantilized at this point? Are we not able to take charge? There, we no longer talk to each other, exchange, take care of each other !!

According to geographer Michel Lussault, confinement and social distancing measures “immediately call into question urbanity”, that is to say the relational life which is at the basis of urban organization. What if finally, this crisis and the fact of having to live with the virus, was an opportunity to launch a reflection on how we can organize our cities differently?

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