The Outbreak (ePub)

In his clandestine shelter in the mountains, Dr. Maximo Garcia, a young physician, narrates the accounts of his real life story in his diary; he tells the real events he went through during the first year of the covid-19 outbreak. He also gives his objective and professional opinion on the pandemic, expressing his philosophical thoughts about the essence of humanity; what it means to be human and what our needs are. He and many others have organized resistance groups, using non-tech tools and methods.

'...It was March 19, 2020. I had just taken a shower when I sat down at the kitchen table to have dinner. As usual, I turned on the TV set to listen to the evening news. As I chewed a chunk of juicy steak, I listened to what the anchorman said. The viral infection seemed to be spreading throughout the whole world quite fast. Thus, it had purportedly become a pandemic. As a result, the president of Argentina had just put the whole country under quarantine to avoid the spread of the infectious disease....

I was thinking that fifteen days were a hell of a long time to live without sex, when I trod on the sixth step. As I set my foot on it, with my full body weight on top, that wooden stair suddenly gave in and broke with a cracking noise. As I went down through the pieces of the broken board that made the step, my head hit the fifth one. As I landed on the cellar ground, my right foot stamped on one of the electrical wire spools that had been stored under the stairway a long time before. Suddenly I lost consciousness as my whole world blacked out.

A long while of dark unawareness went by when I finally woke up, moaning and squirming as I lay on the cold basement floor among wire spools and boxes containing my childhood toys....I had been taught at the university that human beings, like the rest of the order Primates, are social creatures. Physical contact, especially mother-child skin contact, and watching the facial expressions of our beloved ones are of the utmost importance for the development of our personality. Man succeeded in his struggle for survival not alone but as a member of a social group, and the fact that we were able to communicate our feelings and thoughts to one another was an irrefutable proof. But now they were telling us to be isolated from one another and to erase our human face, with the sinister cloak of a mandatory mask....

I remembered my childhood and adolescence years, and the good times we spent together in that house; Christmas days, New Year Eves, Mother's Day, birthdays, and the party my father made when I finally graduated from the University as a physician. A social and family gathering had always been important to us, because it meant the warmth human contact that happened when people got together.

Aside from exchanging and improving ideas through a common language, social connection also implied a hug, a kiss, holding hands, a looking into somebody's eyes, feeling the skin of a woman. All these seemingly trivial human affairs had always been necessary in the history of mankind, because physical contact had been vital for mental stability and maturity. It made you relax; it slackened the built-up tension and you regained your serenity. Yes, physical contact was balm to the human soul....'