Well, then we have bigger problems on our hand
than just a pandemic.
I was actually in Spain at the time
when the emergency was declared.
I was actually working in the Pulmonology department
when it was like close to the lockdown.
The city got locked down on March 17.
The exact last party I went to
was the one I threw for my birthday.
Nebraska didn’t shut down all at once,
although it has been a full year,
so my memory might be a little fuzzy.
The lockdowns started happening gradually
in several cities across the country in Nigeria.
We were there for LibertyCon,
our European-wide conference.
We had a number of leaders from all across Europe who flew in,
we had a number of international guests who flew in,
and it was so kind of chilling to see how quickly things changed.
It was like literally somebody had flicked a switch.
The day before everything was normal,
people were on the streets,
tourists were gathering at the tourist hotspots,
and then overnight it was like something from a zombie movie,
there were no cars, there were no people.
We were anticipating a lockdown,
is it tomorrow, next week?
So we were just anticipating a lockdown,
and it came out of the blue.
I think the lockdown entirely was the wrong approach.
Nigeria was already in a recession,
or slipping into a recession when COVID happened.
So, it was in my opinion a little bit nonsensical.
We adopted the same strategies that other countries in Europe,
in North America were adopting.
It’s not the same reality.
The realities are quite different.
The whole pandemic was managed here in Brazil in a dumb way.
I can tell you many things that were awful.
Here in my city, as well as in the whole country,
they shortened the opening hours for commerce,
thinking that people would not go to commerce if it was closed.
But actually they just got together,
everyone going to the same shop that they would at 9,
now everyone is at 7.
It seems now a year into this pandemic that this response
is not proportional to the actual risk or the harm.
At the start we saw models
predicting that millions of people would die,
we had the model from the UK, computer model.
The narrative that we have at the moment
is that this is going to go on forever.
There’s now mutations,
100% of the population has to be vaccinated
to get your freedoms back,
and for me, as a freedom advocate,
even if the vaccines are 100% safe and effective,
as a freedom advocate,
this is something that is a precedent
that I don’t think we should accept.
The government was trying to get people
together in community-building exercises,
like go outside your house
and light a lamp for 9 minutes at 9 p.m.,
or take your utensils and bang them.
So there was a lot of misinformation around all of this
and this was basically the divergence,
so this was the stupidest thing that happened.
So, our fight was a bit crazy,
and there are some details I won’t go into,
but we’re trying to have the policies
reverted back to what they were in the fall,
that being the voluntary testing.
None of the people on my team had any issues
with testing being a thing on campus,
so long as it was the individual’s choice.
But with the university changing it to being biweekly,
it not only negatively affected schedules,
created issues for students with disabilities,
it also violated our constitutional rights in many ways
and was an invasion of personal privacy and health information.
We have doctors who were on strike during the pandemic
and they are really on strike
because the government has not paid their salaries in months.
My cousin who is a medical doctor who caught COVID
has not been paid since December.
If the government cannot afford to pay
or cannot pay health workers,
then you wonder what’s the money they got from the IMF is doing?
What did they do with that money?
For example, in Brazil, even the most expensive hospitals
are having trouble, and sometimes they say,
“Just build new ICU beds then.”
Okay, you can build these beds,
but who’s going to operate them?
I saw a lot of power shift from citizens to the police force.
If anyone was even remotely going against the restrictions,
like stepping out without the mask,
or other times when there was the curfew or lockdown,
the police really misused their force,
they were beating people up.
I actually think if we were to place the blame
on where this kind of panic has come from,
I would put it on the media.
At the start of the pandemic and even through now,
we have people saying stay home, save lives,
and the mantra was if we can save just one life,
then it will be worth it.
And to an extent I agree with that,
but not at the cost of cancer screenings
being canceled or other treatments,
other people who are not getting operations,
the rise in mental health
which is causing people in some cases
to actually take their life.
Whose case most affected me was of a high school teacher
with whom I had lots of close contact.
She got COVID the middle of last year
and she unfortunately passed away,
and I was really saddened
because she would be really happy to know
how I got into volunteering when all of this started.
I hope she is somewhere and she knows that I miss her
and that she made a whole contribution for me.
So, what regulations do I think were worth it?
Do you know what I think was worth it?
Two weeks to flatten the curve,
that was worth it, that made sense.
To allow the hospitals, to allow the governments
to prepare a strategy to deal with this.
That made it sense.
But when it started to become two weeks more,
and two weeks more, and two weeks more,
without taking into account all of the other circumstances,
the secondary effects of having a lockdown.
The entire approach to the lockdown
could have been a lot more systematic,
not entirely shut down the economy.
I would say restricting travel to heavily infected countries
was useful to a certain extent,
but again, when people landed,
there was again mismanagement
of the passengers who were coming in,
there was no adequate reporting.
So, no matter if you’re a sub or a full-time teacher,
you’re having to teach online and in person at the same time.
And you’re teaching the same lesson two very different ways,
so it heavily complicates things
and it makes me fear
for what might be their behaviors in the future,
their mentalities, and how they can cop out of things.
But what are we going to do right now?
Some people argue against masks,
saying that they’re not perfect, and indeed, they aren’t.
Only a minority of them block aerosol transmission,
but still, if you are wearing a good mask
and you are wearing it correctly,
so well adjusted to your face, above the nose,
if everything is going fine,
you are going to avoid this respiratory droplet transmission.
99% of the people survive,
okay, I will take this data as true, maybe.
It can be an average,
but I pretty much doubt that it is true everywhere.
You have to consider that in the first world, for example,
you have better hospital care if you need it,
and you have access to better healthcare systems,
which we don’t necessarily have
in poorer countries such as Brazil.
My view is that
if governments were not able to pivot and address this,
then we have much bigger problems on our hands
than a virus with this 99.99... whatever.
If we’re 13 going on 14 months into this
and they’re still saying we need to lock everybody down
because there is an overflow in the hospitals,
well then we have bigger problems on our hands
than just a pandemic.