This short paragraph, maybe naively, or maybe hopefully reiterates the (now outdated) rhetoric of the “we’re all in this together”. During the first wave, staying at home was a way to protect oneself and their beloved one, to mitigate the coronavirus spread and to avoid putting a strain on the health care system. But the poem also calls for pausing, if only for a split second, the untenable speed of pre-pandemic life, the crazy traveling, the unstoppable global system of trade, the constant growth, the endless transactions and their productivity. We know today that this first lockdown really didn’t produce the effects many hoped for: it only caused a temporary slow down, where only the most privileged could afford to shelter in place; despite the praises and the clapping, frontline and health care workers did not see their working condition improve; the call for care and caring for each other, the much needed reinvesting in and strengthening of depleted health systems and better social services did not deliver.

The reality is that the pandemic did not initiate any crisis but exacerbated and made visible one that was already in progress: from the strain suffered by severely underfunded and understaffed hospitals to the taken-for-granted inequalities dominating the delivery of health care, the roots of this crisis are as cultural as they are economic and environmental.  Among the underlying factors contributing to the current crisis is a dominant orientation towards healthcare that privileges a narrow focus on data-centered technological fixes and praises the potentials of technological delegation. An unsustainable system and a ruthless economy based on the necropolitical management of individuals and populations has culminated in the passive acceptance and even the cold justification of triage as an inevitable evil in a time of crisis and scarcity.

The current system forces individuals to compete in a bizarre struggle of the fittest, where the vulnerable reclaim their rights to the disadvantage of others equally vulnerable, and institutional and technological apparatuses decide who is saved and who is left to perish according to criteria that dangerously smack of new eugenics. We see this in triage and we see it in the hoarding of vaccines by wealthier countries; we see it in the abandonment of mental health patients, cancer patients and generally, the poor.

I am aware that the pandemic also saw many gestures of solidarity, and in some cases the emergence, or the consolidation of new practices of care understood holistically and interdisciplinary, rather than sectorially.  

FOR THIS ROUNDTABLE WE INVITED A GROUP of scholars, researchers and creative thinkers to turn a critical eye on the systemic and epistemic failures that have brought us this very prolonged, and now worsening crisis.