»It’s Just a Flu« – What We Can Learn from Our Mistakes

Abstract

We can learn a number of things from what's been happening these past few weeks. I would like to try to articulate them starting from two sentences that we have all heard many times in recent days, when the course of the epidemic seemed more uncertain: "it's just a flu", on the one hand, and its opposite " it's more serious than a simple flu", on the other. The meaning of knowledge, common sense, and decision-making has been measured around these two opposite ways of interpreting Covid-19. These are all issues that concern, in different ways, common sense, science, philosophy and politics.