Covid-19

The impact of the pandemic on the Brazilian prison system is vast and reveals the lack of homogeneity in the system, considering the way it deals with the management of prison units. We bring attention to the unconstitutionality of how state secretariats and the federal government deal with the management of the lives of people deprived of freedom, mostly poor and black. The scarcity of information about people affected by the virus, both those deprived of liberty and public employees responsible for their care, and the carelessness on treating the relatives of prisoners reflect the lack of ethics aimed at valuing people. Most families cannot obtain information about the state of health of their relatives or whether they have been affected by the virus-related illness. I published an article1 on the prison situation in Brazil today on the UFRJ News Portal. We have the third-largest prison population in the world2 in unhealthy conditions, overcrowding, inadequate water supply, precarious diet, shortage of health personnel, and presence of diseases, such as tuberculosis, measles, syphilis, HIV, meningitis, potentiate the contamination by COVID-19, which assumes characteristics of a massacre.

On March 11th, the World Health Organization (WHO) decreed the new coronavirus pandemic. Eleven days later, the first victim of Covid-19 died in Brazil: she was a black 63 years old woman, a domestic worker, hypertensive, diabetic. She used to work at Leblon and live in Miguel Pereira, in Rio de Janeiro. Marcelo Crivella, the mayor (Republicans), decreed the quarantine for the entire carioca population on the same day, and it would begin on the following Tuesday, March 24th. At that time, there was information that the Brazilian reported contagion cases were still "imported," and travelers should quarantine. Still, Cleonice Gonçalves was cooking at her employer's house. The employer returned from Italy, bringing in the luggage much more than pleasant trip memories. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. The situation repeats in several news reports, to the point that many believe that the Covid-19 was just a "disease of rich people, who traveled abroad."

It seems strange to say that a disease that is just beginning to be discovered is a long-standing family member of some populations that live on this planet. However, this is the case concerning the experience that is beginning to be lived by Brazilian indigenous peoples with COVID-19. This is the case because viruses and bacteria have been allied for centuries with the greed of economic exploitation, acting together with this in the death of indigenous populations. Whooping cough, smallpox, chickenpox, measles, malaria, bubonic plague, typhus, diphtheria, conjunctivitis, and flu are diseases whose pathological agents exterminated or substantially reduced people who had no immune barrier to the ills brought with the supposed civilization. Microorganisms change, but the massacres remain.

On 5 April 2020, the risk group guidelines for COVID-19 underwent the first change in Brazil. Among the people at greatest risk of contagion would also be high risk pregnant and puerperal women: pregnant women with diabetes, hypertension, and chronic diseases - because of their commodities – and women who have recently given birth. At the end of the same week, the Ministry of Health (Brazil) changed again the guidelines and included all pregnant women as a risk group, as well as women who had an abortion recently.

There is never a good time to be stuck with a denialist but perhaps there is no worse time than at the emergence of a pandemic caused by an agent with high infection power. Or maybe we have only made the transition from epidemic to pandemic because of the obstinacy of the deniers.

The coronavirus pandemic certainly opens a new class of global fear. It is not like that anxieties, panics and global worries did not exist previously. However, as globalization is a historical process that has become increasingly sharp, it is expected that the last global fear will be more intense and complex than the others. What am I calling global fear? Here is a work definition: it is all tantalizing fear felt for all the inhabitants of a collective, with an expectation of an enormous amount of deaths, which potentially or in fact will reach everyone, and will bring an end to the world, known until a certain period of time. I leave the definition in a broad way to include some collective fears – obviously without any pretension of exhausting the examples – which, although are not planetary, will certainly include the feeling of the end of the world in a sort of archaeology of this terrible sensation, one real total social fact, as Marcel Mauss would say, that entails physiological, biological, psychological, cultural, political, economic, social and scientific responses.

The coronavirus pandemic, among explicit policies and ordinary practices, exposes life-and-death decisions that require thoughts about possible outcomes. The effects of the pandemic do not only involve the relationship between a virus and bodies but rather are produced politically, based on unequal conditions and situations of life and practices, programs, and policies for its consideration.

In recent years in Social Sciences, particularly in anthropology, an ethnographic critique of the concept of life has been gaining strength, discussing its self-evident character and questioning the binarisms that oppose biological and biographical lives, natural lives and social lives, universes of life and death, of human and non-human lives, and which also focuses on the links between human lives and the lives of other species - links that are so important to shed light on the socio-biological dynamics of the pandemic that currently sweeps the planet. Similarly, relevant to understanding our present are the relationships between life and the economy, which until the current crisis seemed to have remained outside the radar of our disciplines. In this brief essay, I propose a view of these relations (between life and economy) on the ones I have been working on for some time, never imagining that they would have the dramatic relevance that they have gained in the last few months, turning into strategic questions to outline the present and the future of our collective existence.

Some mantras of planetary globalism dominant until now were: move, travel, accelerate, grow, expand, extract (resources), consume, privatize, do flexible (labor relations), delocaçize (companies)… All of this, in face of the Coronavirus pandemic, was suddenly reversed: stop, do not travel, slow down, withdraw, do not consume, invest in public policies, nationalize (companies in crisis)... Here, amid a neoliberal boom, like a plague, the last mantra to be contested has not yet been reversed: for workers, further flexibilization of labor relations continues to be proposed, as if they were testing how far the resignation of this mass of extremely vulnerable (un)employees goes. It is as if, while the rich people can stop and protect themselves, the poor must continue to move, taking risks to ensure our survival.

In Matthew 18:20, Jesus said, “For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them”. But what to do when a virus (agnostic and uninvited) threatens to infect the group of faithful and to make them sick and, in some cases, to lead them to death?