The corona and the lonely king

After all it took a bloody virus to remove the last claim to superiority that we southerners had over our northern brethren, at least in this Europe of mine. I mean, how many times have I not found myself missing and hating, but more missing than hating, the whole family thing of the Spanish and the Italians, against the cold and efficient dutch social contract? It is true that I would not be able to keep any sort of peace in any of my family gatherings, but it is also true that I envy my sister and my mother, whom after thirty years in Venezuela have gone back to the whole family that awaited them in Argentina. Frequently I read the lines of the whatsapp messages and I tell myself that I still don’t understand all those gatherings, all those photos of cousins and nephews happily eating together. And yet it is true that I envy them, at least a bit.

But hey, now we know. The more northern societies have kept the inter generational contact to a minimum not only for the psychological stability of people like me. It turns out that households with elders around are the truly infection centers for the corona virus. Did you tell yourself that you were taking care of your parents, meanwhile knowing that they were taking care of you? well, none of it was true. Actually you are functioning as a vector for all the infections that are around, particularly covid 19. So the greater numbers of deceased in Italy and Spain. Or so hypothesize The Economist , citing an interesting article “Social Contacts and Mixing Patterns Relevant to the Spread of Infectious Diseases”, published in PLOS Medicine already in 2008. Perhaps it is better,after all, to leave our elders on their own.

And yet, even if the cold numbers tell us that it is better to be alone in Germany than surrounded by family in Italy, I can’t but wonder about the speech of the Dutch king yesterday night, when his platitudes ended with “we can’t stop the coronavirus, but we can stop the solitudevirus”.

Really Willem-Alexander? Really?