These days marked the anniversary of the first confinement by the coronavirus pandemic in the United Kingdom, on March 23, 2020.
It is also the anniversary of the kick of these columns: locked in London, writing helped me a lot to cope with this unprecedented situation.
Marches and countermarches
After passing the 350 dead line earlier that month, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson decided to abandon the strategy of “herd immunity” to one of “lockdown” and “flattening of the hat” paralyzing everyone. the economy, and for the first time since World War II, with an order restricting public mobility.
Of course, what Italy, parts of France and Spain already suffered, would be a reality in a few weeks throughout the United Kingdom but with more cases and deaths in England.
Boris Johnson at the beginning of March 2020 discouraged the importance of the virus as it happened, also in a bombastic way, in the United States.
Of the countries of Europe, Boris was the only leader without wearing a chinstrap or without stopping to shake hands and hugs during his political visits; Some images that still attract attention, but have an explanation: seeing the pandemic as a political challenge and not as a threat.
The furious tenant
The British parliamentary political system has enviable characteristics in terms of the seriousness of the profession of representing the citizen, and also in its eagerness to enforce the norms and rules over the conjuncture. But, like the Palace of Westminster itself, its historic cracks are increasingly difficult to repair. Boris, in this context, is not a bricklayer but an angry tenant.
In Argentina we have the damn habit of envying the alien with opinions formed with biases and with little dedication to the data or the real experience of those countries that we like to compare ourselves to.
Perhaps that convenience analysis is easier because what motivates us is the shock rather than the iteration of improving our own.
Not everything is what it seems, except in the United Kingdom, which during 2020 not only made very serious mistakes in handling the pandemic, but it was also the year of Brexit.
One year after the first lockdown of March 2020 in the UK, we are still in the third. Since November 2020, the order to stay at home restricts the normal movement of people – something like Phase 1 of Argentina.
Before November we were also in confinement for four weeks that did not work, going into the strict lockdown that we are in now.
If we add the days of the quarantine in Argentina and compare it with the British one, more than one would be surprised to see which country really had the longest quarantine in the world.
But here it is always worth clarifying something: comparisons between countries without taking into account their contexts, are simply symptoms of intellectual laziness. Clearly the United Kingdom is not Argentina, and not all health strategies are applied in the same way. So even in qualified and contextualized comparison, data matters. Today the United Kingdom has 126,000 deaths (1862 deaths per million inhabitants) and Argentina 54,000 (1209 deaths per million inhabitants).
The per capita GDP of the United Kingdom is four times greater than that of Argentina. And while public spending is synonymous with waste in our country, the United Kingdom took on debt to alleviate the pandemic, breaking all financial records and reaching 97.5% of the debt / GDP ratio.
So, looking from the United Kingdom to Argentina, are you trying to say that our country made, does, perfect public policies during the pandemic? No. What we are trying to demonstrate by looking at Argentina from the United Kingdom is the ability to learn from the failed and virtuous processes of other sides to perfect our own, but with a spirit of improvement and not of political punishment.
Education
It occurs with the issue of education in a pandemic.
The classroom cycle in the UK also suffers from similar problems to Argentina. The advantage of the school year in Argentina allowed in some way to choose virtuality within the same school year. In the United Kingdom, the pandemic affected the halves of two school years together that triggered a major crisis in July 2020 when university entrance exams were canceled from prepo.
An entire generation was unable to access university, which is not public in the UK. Of course, spending a whole school period online – with all the inequalities that this entails – is not a satisfactory solution. Only to note that the counterpoints with the comparisons to the outside seem to be done to discredit itself and never to learn, innovate and overcome.
The eternal dilemma that what is outside is worth more promotes two long-term problems: it equates what is not comparable, and it stresses trust in the innate.
Another example of impact is the vaccination process.
Context first. Argentina and the United Kingdom are in a select group of 18 countries that combine two variables: they have an active vaccination program, and two: both countries are above the world average for the number of people vaccinated per 100 inhabitants, which is 5.8 ( Argentina has 6.9 and the United Kingdom 44.6). More context: while Argentina is struggling to get vaccine suppliers that achieve a constant flow of doses, the UK has enough stock to vaccinate its entire population (66 million) twice.
In other words, you have signed contracts for 400 million doses. It is no coincidence that the stock of vaccines is concentrated between the United States and the United Kingdom.
Not only economic power has its role, but also the absence of a multilateral system that sees the pandemic as a global threat and not a race towards vaccine nationalism.
The Donald Trump years were perhaps the first pandemic. Therefore, questioning the lack of vaccines in Argentina has a correlation with the context of world order. The privileged vaccination no. The highly inequitable access to the vaccine highlights what Chile is doing: taking the necessary risk of applying a 51% effective vaccine in order to have a guaranteed flow.
Argentina today has flow problems, which, as is being seen in the region and in Europe, is the only thing that guarantees avoiding the third and fourth waves.
So finish as in the last installments: the pandemic has not ended.
Experience from Europe shows that the second wave is much more lethal, and that is why, both in data, comparisons, as well as in care and social distancing, we must remain vigilant to learn from the pandemic.
* Mg. Public politics. Co-director Jiménez- Buttazzoni Consulting
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