The numbers, high or low, are numbers that will never be able to illustrate the pain and bitter experiences that come with the mere fact of knowing we are suspicious, of having the slightest symptom.

In the heat of the new COVID-19 daily sicknesses, with the sad and forceful reality of this past Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, I cannot standstill. I see bad decisions everywhere. Fissures open to a disease that came, it seems, to test our love and collective intelligence.

So, roughly speaking, because personally a lot can be added to the rules of the game. Deadly, aggressive, invisible, multiplying, ambitious in terms of resources, the evolution of the disease, health regimes, clinical manifestations, and sequelae. From what I read and research, in this virus two plus two is not always four. And there, I think, we also open a crack in it by not being fully aware of that.

If you observe the daily behavior of people, in any scenario, it is almost impossible to doubt that a visible part still lives "in its normality". If you analyze many decisions and look for the control of their fulfillment, there are dangerous distances between what we orient, discourse, and do.

What is the point, I say, of imposing restricted schedules if mobility is not checked in the neighborhoods? Why do we allow crowds in polyclinics to perform rapid tests? Is it a fantastic utopia to think that they could be performed in clinics or to summon all the contacts of a family or workers of a center at one hour and solve, with clinical knowledge, the real contagion of this chain of transmission?

I don't think I am looking at the issue from the "outside". There are serious resource issues, unavoidable, impossible to get immediately as before, where another order was placed and it was a matter of opening a warehouse or locating the task manager to get it in front of you.

There is exhaustion. Nothing is more tiring than continuous tension and stress. These factors impact the immune response and that enhances vulnerability and weakens us to the virus. My panic is the decisions, yours, mine, his... I recognize the gigantic efforts, the will to prioritize the elementary, to distribute the little among many..., but we still do not subtract. This regrowth is a thinking monster. It is necessary to think.

And here I am faced with another dilemma: was the best way to distribute food (I am talking about all the items and offers) the Mambi ruckus? It is over. Many went home happy, with products that are not seen every day, but since the night before many also set up the queues and the physical distancing vanished everywhere.

The mask is a constant that, fortunately, is gaining in respect and use, however, we know by heart that it does not save by itself. In the hands of those who dispatched in the haste of the moment and those who had the greed to buy could hide the SARS-COV-2 and go quietly and sadly to any house. And here there are no possible fantasies. There are sanitary certainties and epidemiological risks.

Wouldn't it have been good to take into account so many fingerprints together on a counter, given the positivity of cases in this capital city? In our personal, governmental, institutional, labor, community, family decisions... in the smallest space, there is a valuable potential to counteract the disease. But right there may be the deadly Delta variant, which does not have the common symptoms that shook us in March 2019 but may transit asymptomatic, confuse us and not let us escape from now on.

Not the red zones or the isolation centers or homes are immune, even our own shoes can be the cave of danger. It is known that many, unfortunately, are deaf to the repeated warning calls. The numbers are there.

Do not decide without putting the scales of the heart and life in the foreground. Love now does not need hugs and affection that in other times we hid or carried in minimal doses in the backpacks of our chests.

Now, even if it hurts and breaks our habits, that feeling is pure sanity, respect for each dawn, for that force that unites us by surname or self-will. That is the embrace.

It is not a matter of saying or creating an environment of well-being, knowing the risks and with living, real, demonstrable, and countable experience. We are in the hardest of battles because death comes if we do not decide to live up to the invisible adversary we have. That is why, just for that reason, my panic is called "decision."