As I write this I am sitting in a Café in Urbino Italy. We have a meeting this afternoon to see if UTSA is going to make the 62 students and 3 faculty members who are studying here come home in the next few days. Italy is still at a Level 2 risk according to the CDC which means to exercise caution, but there is no travel ban to Europe. In the meantime, as the Corona Virus panic spreads across the globe, the government of Italy has panicked and are taking draconian, and futile measures to look as though they are doing something. The waiter who just brought my pizza asked if I was Americano, and then said in his opinion that because of this virus the “whole world has gone stupid!” I couldn’t say it better myself. In their efforts to contain the virus the Italians started testing people sooner than in the rest of Europe, and guess what, when you test you find the virus. Experts think that the vast majority of people who get it are asymptomatic, or at least not sick enough to even go to a Doctor. Nevertheless, they cordoned off Milan, and shut down Venice. If this goes on much longer the economic havoc in those cities will probably cause more fatalities in the long run, than the virus. Having just realized that they probably made the situation worse, the incendiary Italian Press is now calling for calm. That horse is clearly already out of the barn. In the meantime, Austria, Spain, and inevitably cities in the US are going to have to realize that we cannot control the spread of this virus, and making people scared to get medical help because they might be quarantined will make it worse. We need to move to the next management stage, which is making sure that everyone knows what the symptoms are, that schools and employers allow sick people to stay home without penalty, that hospitals have the staff they need to safely treat people, and that people seek medical help before they reach the critical stages of the illness. We also need to see this as our window of opportunity to: 1)Stop electing officials who play to popular fears and are totally unprepared to lead when we need them to. If you are under 35 and haven’t been politically active, you better start. There are a lot of older, reactionary, fearful people out there who will sell your environmental, educational, and healthcare future to the highest bidder because they are afraid of change and losing power. 2)Implement a Media Literacy campaign that we push just as hard as we have pushed the Drunk Driving and Anti-Smoking campaigns. People should feel embarrassed to pass on or believe false information. We need to demand that the press focus more on information, and less on hype, and that they start covering solutions as well as problems. This situation is not the result of a conspiracy, it is a biological phenomenon. I am absolutely confident that this virus will turn out to be less lethal than the annual flu, never mind the many times in history that diseases have swept through populations. So far approximately 12 people have died here in Italy, virtually all older people in poor health to start. After visiting Rome, I looked up the stats on Pedestrian deaths in Italy. In 2018 the number of people killed in accidents while walking was over 1,600 people. I haven’t seen any efforts to put in extra lights or to give drivers tickets if they fail to stop at crosswalks. Why? Because walking isn’t an unfamiliar, foreign risk, and it seems like we have control, so people ignore the dangers. https://www.wantedinmilan.com/news/612-pedestrians-killed-on-italys-roads-in-2018.html 3)Stop pretending that we don’t need experts, scientists, higher education, or better public schools. Vaccines and treatments for these sorts of viruses aren’t going to be developed by blow hard politicians who have hollowed out all of our regulatory agencies, cut funding to public schools at every single level, and slashed research funding and health care so they could appease the people who donate money to their campaigns. We are going to need extraordinarily able economic, financial, and technological experts, dedicated social scientists and medical researchers, well-trained health care providers, and the best people we can find to teach our children. The world is only going to get more complicated, and pretending that it was better, or easier in the past, is of absolutely no use in the present. 4)Take personal responsibility for stemming the tide of dramatic, irrational beliefs that are engulfing us both through traditional and social media. It is far easier to be negative, cynical, and critical of other people’s efforts than it is to create positive moments, to genuinely reach out to help other people and to try solutions even if there is no guarantee they will work. In the midst of all of this it snowed last night, reminding us that life goes on, and the world is still bellisimo! Snow in Urbino Last Night!
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