The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has exposed a dichotomy that currently affects the population of the entire world: an integrated social health system works better with governments presumably called left-wing or with a government of a clear liberal or neoliberal cut right?
This dichotomy is not new. It has existed for many years and has often formed the basis of electoral platforms in (almost) all political campaigns.
It is argued that popular governments (so as not to call them left-wing) sustain their political hegemony on three basic pillars: free public education and healthcare so that it is available to the entire population. The third element, the rights of the worker, is not part of this analysis, and therefore we will not consider it.
In the same way, it is affirmed that the liberal or neoliberal governments support their political framework in the reduction of public spending through privatizations, which extend to other sectors of the economy such as education, creating a kind of selection in society: who can have access to certain services and who cannot.
How much is true and how much false in each of these statements and their implications in these times of pandemic?
We will try to analyze it below.
Left governments favor public health.
This is an irrevocable truth. With all the excesses that they can commit (which should not be tolerable in any society that claims to be democratic) the so-called popular governments (we will put aside the concept of the left since this conceptually and doctrinally does not exist anymore) have been based their politics in an axis that has public health on the one hand, with free and free access to the entire population, at one end, and education with the same characteristics, at the other.
The premise is simple: all citizens must have access to two inalienable rights in every modern society: education and healthcare.
But to what extent is this fulfilled? That is to say, the political campaign promises to what point are they carried out by all popular governments?
Is it true that with these governments schools and hospitals are built and equipped with the necessary personnel to function properly?
To a certain extent and in some countries yes. In others a little less.
It is difficult to find in a Latin American country a popular government that has not fought, to a greater or lesser extent, against illiteracy. And against private medicine also called prepaid? Here a little less.
And this is where the doctrinal promise of popular governments does not always translate into reality.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed in Latin America that the facts are not always shown as they are. The media monopolies always do their own business and redirect people's thinking where they want. TV, social networks, various content platforms. Everyone does their part. People live inside a virtual world.
In Latin America, some countries prepared for the pandemic and, although they could not avoid the contagion produced sometimes by the intemperance of people themselves to respect security protocols (the so-called anti-quarantine), they could greatly limit fatal cases.
Argentina, for example, has registered a percentage of deaths of around 2-3% of infections throughout the pandemic. Specifically 2.7% of deaths as shown in the following graph:
With a long quarantine, the number of infections has been proportionally 2.7% of the total population (1,296,378 / 47,000,000, which is approximately the total population).
While in Europe, countries such as Spain and Italy, to cite just two examples, had 12% deaths in the middle of the pandemic in relation to the number of infections. An abysmal difference. In remarkably developed countries but where public health is no longer absolutely free to be replaced by numerous tariffs. Currently the global number of deaths in Italy is 4% while in Spain it is 2.8%
It is noteworthy that both countries have been accused of fraudulently manipulating the data of the pandemic to be favored with a greater amount of money originated by the mega-loan of 774,000 million euros that the Business Union has issued in a rescue operation for the European economies .
In Italy for example (I have lived in Europe for more than 20 years) each benefit in hospitals, with a minimum of one consultation or an analysis, is paid the equivalent of 36.15 Euros. Let each one make the conversion in their own currency. But we are talking about 45 USD.
With the paradox that a public tariff system has fewer and fewer beds available. SW
In the Liguria region, in the last 10 years, more than 150 assistance centers were closed (including first aid rooms and small hospitals) with the excuse of concentrating medical care in large centers.
This is demonstrated by the following statistics:
The United States, the country par excellence of the private economy, has registered 244,364 deaths out of a total of 10,746,898 infections with a percentage of 2.27 that is aligned with the rest. If we estimate the US population at 328 million we will have that the percentage of infections over the total population is 3.28%
In other countries such as Venezuela, the percentage of infections is very low, only 0.3% of the population (96,441 infected out of a population of almost 29 million inhabitants) although in this case the figures are highly contested by a sector of the population and the media. And even the number of deaths reaches only 844 the lowest in the entire region with a percentage of 0.8%, which makes one suspect that the figures are artificially managed.
So, based on the fidelity of the data (not always verified) that each government transmits, what is the effect of the pandemic on governments of absolutely opposite ideologies?
I will deal with that in a future article.