We are a privileged generation because, as Professor Nicholas Christakis, an eminent epidemiologist and sociologist from Yale University, says, he was crowned “Intellectual Rock Star” by the New York Times.
He cites the Bible, Homer, even Shakespeare, and reminds us that major epidemics are part of the “human experience” about “every 100 years”. This is an objective truth. A truth that also gives us a glimpse of what lies ahead. And it’s for the best, since we are, it should be remembered, the very first generation capable of inventing a treatment in our lifetime: namely, a vaccine. “And it’s a miracle! “
Professor Christakis expects a total “reversal of trends”: “People will be looking for social interaction at all costs! […] This is what we saw after the great plagues […]: the emergence of unbridled sexual behavior, the return of spending, and an effervescence on the side of arts and entrepreneurship! “
The economist Pierre Fortin seems to agree with Professor Christakis, the households in Western societies that were the most affected, did not spend, with the successive confinements, people remained locked up and consumed little.
There is a big difference between the end of the Spanish flu pandemic and the Covid 19 pandemic, the difference is that after the Spanish flu, it was also the end of the first world war, a terrible war that killed tens of millions of people. The world was in darkness since 1914, plus 7 years in a climate of fear, war, death and injury. After this dark period of human history, everyone had a thirst to live, to breathe, to have fun, to live, to eat. In 2021, the situation is different, no war and much less deaths and especially effective vaccines, only 10 months after the appearance of the pandemic.
Moreover, sociologist Simon Langlois, professor emeritus at the University of Laval, declares: “The Roaring Twenties of the 20th century marked the rejection of the shortages and miseries of wartime, as well as the beginning of a flight forward, a kind of negation of the horror experienced in the trenches and the millions of deaths in the prime of life.
Everyone is happy to see the end of this pandemic and historian Laurent Turcot sums up the current situation perfectly when he says, “For a long time we thought that hell was other people, but now we know that hell is solitude! “and he adds “The recent pandemic has provoked a transfer of power from the States to the web giants and has undermined individual liberties. We didn’t talk about surveillance capitalism in the 1920s”!
Comment here