Articulo cedido por:
Resumen:
La pandemia de la COVID-19 que actualmente estamos viviendo, presenta importantes similitudes con la epidemia de ébola que azotó África Occidental entre los años 2013 y 2016. Este documento busca señalar y analizar los puntos en común de ambas crisis, destacando su aparición repentina, el hecho de que ambas son «enfermedades del cuidador» y que ambas tuvieron que ser afrontadas con unos medios insuficientes.
Una vez se han señalado estas debilidades estructurales, se propone una serie de medidas de refuerzo sistémico que conciernen tanto a las capacidades sanitarias nacionales de cada país, como a la estructura y las leyes internacionales; destacando especialmente el papel de la OMS y del Reglamento Sanitario Internacional.
Palabras clave:
Ébola, coronavirus, pandemia, epidemia, COVID-19.
Introduction: Harbingers of the COVID-19
For a long time, it was believed that only white swans existed, until black swans were found in Australia. Even though this discovery was shocking at its age, when the question was reframed retrospectively, it seemed logical to believe that swans may be black as well.
The black swan metaphor is usually employed in Economics to designate an event that is believed to be unexpected or highly unlikely, but that has a great impact and that, retrospectively, (that is, once it has occurred) it seems reasonable to think that it could have been predicted from the very beginning1.
For many people around the world, the irruption of Covid-19 has been, indeed, a terrible surprise or an outright disaster. Countless plans, projects, hopes and lives have been obliterated by the advent of this black swan, that has suddenly emerged out of the blue.
At early June 2020, with a de-escalation process starting in Spain, the global figures of the Coronavirus are staggering more than six million people have been infected, and 370.000 have perished2. Aside from this count of human casualties, the damage inflicted on the global economy is so big that some experts already label it as thebiggest since the 1930s Great Depression3.
Covid-19 has certainly felled our world, leaving us facing a shaky future. And a question now assaults many minds: Could we have prevented this? Could we have predicted it? Quarantine has been a fertile time for reflection, and many “prophetic” elements have been found, showing different levels of logical foundations:
In a TED-Talk five years ago, the famous multimillionaire founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, disserted about the hefty threat that a communicable disease would constitute in the current, hyper-connected world4.