Opinion – Josimar Melo: The two sides of the seesaw

And the crazy seesaw continues. Every day, every week, 2020 keeps showing up, even though in theory we have entered a new year.

When we look at the high side of the seesaw, the news for travelers is enthusiastic. In Brazil, airlines have been announcing an unprecedented warming in their movement. Taken on drugs by the summer vacation period, flights were filling up, following record occupancy (and prices as well) in hotels across Brazil.

Although international routes had not yet regained the same momentum as in the past, at the end of December the forecast was that at the beginning of this year the movement on domestic flights in Brazil would be at the same level as in 2019, pre-pandemic. Goodbye, crisis.

Just not. On the underside of the seesaw, you see a bizarre situation. Two examples of the madness of current times: in Brazil, dozens of flights are being cancelled. Missing passengers? Not necessarily: the problem now is an unprecedented lack of crew, driven by the increase in Covid-19 and flu cases among airline workers.

This week alone, the forecast was for the cancellation of 630 flights on two companies, Latam and Azul (this with data from last Tuesday, 11; it may have already gone up).

In Europe, the situation is even more bizarre. On the one hand, there are also flight cancellations due to low demand – a single group, Lufthansa (which includes Swiss and others), announced the cancellation of 3,000 flights in January and February.

But there is also another phenomenon: even with the lack of passengers, many flights continue to take off… empty! The same giant Lufthansa has already made eighteen thousand flights without passengers (!) this European winter.

The explanation: according to European Community rules, if companies do not honor 50% of their flights, they will lose their airport slots (ie, they lose the right to use reserved positions and times to operate their aircraft).

Before the pandemic, the rule required to fulfill 80% of scheduled flights. But, even having lowered the required index, keeping half of the flights in the air, even without passengers, is a lot – just imagine the gigantic and useless carbon emission that this entails (which, incidentally, led environmentalist Greta Thunberg to mock in a tweet: “The European Union has even turned on climate emergency mode…”).

In all this nonsense, the one thing that is clear — and unfortunately, immutable — is that the pandemic is as relentless as it is unpredictable. Each day its plot brings surprises, and provokes reactions that are often clumsy. It is impossible to understand how a part of humanity has not yet realized that the most prudent thing is to fight the disease head on.

Traveling requires precautions, and perhaps the best thing to do is to postpone the next trip a little longer. In the meantime, give him a mask, distance and… vaccine, of course. The vaccine prevents suffering and deaths to those who contract the disease – it is not by chance that most of those currently killed by Covid-19 had not been vaccinated.

A cynical look would conclude that each of them is equivalent to one less right-wing extremist in the world (and in the next elections around the world). But the fact is that they don’t die alone: ​​the severity of the disease in unvaccinated causes hospitalizations that can produce collapses in the health system, producing more deaths, and not just from Covid.

Ironically, even those who do not want to be vaccinated and would rather die should be vaccinated, for the common good.

* More irony, in two tourist spots. In the week that completes one year the invasion of the Capitol (Washington, DC), which killed five people, in Capitol (MG) a rock collapses, killing ten others. A political tragedy and a natural tragedy unite two hemispheres of this very small world in mourning.