2020, a before and after

Abstract

Humanity has already suffered a few pandemics throughout its history, such as the Black Death in the 14th century, the Spanish flu between 1918-1920 or diseases like smallpox, measles, typhoid, HIV, etc. that have taken millions of lives and have altered the daily routine of many more. Who would have imagined that in the 21st century, the most technological era in our history, we would have to deal with something similar? The swine flu of 2009 or the Ebola crisis, with the first infections and deaths in Spain back in 2014, are also far behind us. How fragile our memory is! Surely we hardly remember those days in front of the screens to see the evolution of those epidemics... just a few years ago. Of course, the impact was really small. And, suddenly, we have to deal with a worldwide pandemic that we started to know something about at the end of 2019 and that we have ended up knowing and suffering as COVID-19 or, simply, as coronavirus.