A long journey

The mass media and social media are by design not well-equipped to react to slow-moving yet tumultuous events. The COVID pandemic is proving to be unusually problematic in this way. It started as a sideshow in a city in Central China that almost no one had heard of and has now morphed into one of the biggest events in a lifetime. Moreover, even though there are big headlines to be written every day about the cases of the previous day, events are actually moving quite slowly. Sometimes it feels that nothing has changed for months. Or has it? As I write this page, when I open the home pages of the leading newspapers of Europe, it becomes clear that the transition to a post-COVID state is actually almost as s