To anyone who will listen, the commentators who claim to be informed gargle with a false satisfaction. It is fortunate, they say, that for the first time in the history of mankind, we have chosen to counter this coronaviral epidemic by focusing on health rather than economics.

     Yet it would be more accurate and sincere to say that, as a whole, homo sapiens has slowly become homo timoratus, if not homo phobicus, or even homo stultus; as a result, some of the species, for fear of lawsuits, complaints and rejection, others because of a genetic defect, and many because of hebetude, have opted for the now bloodless world of hospitals in order to preserve the residual comfort that remained despite the successive cutbacks in the name of the economy.

     So it was not out of compassion for their fellow human beings that the aberrant confinement was decided upon, and it cannot be said that it was effective, since the rare comparisons with other, less authoritarian nations show an astonishing similarity in the results obtained, if not better; not out of compassion, therefore, but purely out of fear of all kinds of litigious citizens who, since the contaminated blood episode, have been looking for someone to blame for all the hazards disrupting the banality of their existence.

     Admittedly, the emergence of this virus, like hundreds of others in the past or future, with their alter-ego the bacteria, acting in the same way from time to time, was more insignificant than a grain of sand in disrupting the fine workings of our daily lives. But not much more, perhaps just as much, or even less, than the epidemics that humanity has had to deal with on a regular basis since its very beginnings, and which are never mentioned, if at all. This viral attack was given unbridled publicity which, like a self-sustaining hurricane, swept away all fears, imagining in this aggressive bug the emanation of a Hecatonchire intentionally released by an Asian Zeus wishing to reign supreme, or a pesticide destroying nature, facilitating the birth of a Chimera devouring those it encountered. Few doctors would argue that it was just another disease, to be treated as a doctor and not as a faint-hearted one. They were not listened to. Worse still, they tried to discredit them.

     You always have to find reasons for your fears and phobias. To anaesthetise them. So we confined people, in the name of the precautionary principle and the global fear that now rules our societies, without bothering to find out whether we were about to fall from Charybdis into Scylla, whether the remedy might not be worse than the disease.

     Frightening statistics, adding to the terror, were thus communicated, predicting a kind of apocalypse if nothing was done to contain the advance of the monster. Even today, it is repeated over and over again that it is still there, lurking in some corner ready to pounce on its prey, despite the obvious fact that it is constantly vanishing.

     Humanity ceased to live, confined as it was in its prison of prohibitions. Activity ceased. The economy was flattened and ruined. A few naïve people believed that degrowth was finally taking over from capitalism, hoping, like modern Attila, that globalisation would not push back where they had applauded.

     Then reality slowly set in. Not everyone was dead, but many were abandoned, left by the wayside. They would die, socially or physically, probably more violently than a viral attack. Inevitably, many of them, rejoicing in this interlude, will become the new victims of this new executioner, the economic disaster.

     Just like the animals in the fable that Babrius, a Roman fabulist writing in Greek, entitled "The Oxen", translated into French by M. Sommer in 1848, which I will read in extenso by way of conclusion.

21 - THE OXEN.

     One day the oxen tried to get rid of the butchers, whose profession is so fatal to them. Already they were gathering and sharpening their horns for battle. One of them, an old ox who had dragged the plough for a long time, said to them: "At least they have a clever hand and kill us without doing us too much harm; but it will be twice as much to die to fall under the blows of clumsy men; In the absence of butchers, the oxen will still have enough slaughterers. »

     Before fleeing from a present evil, see to it that you don't fall into a worse one.