As the news on the outbreak of the new coronavirus disease Covid-19 follow one another, it has become clear that we are in front of an emergency.

With over 88,000 cases and almost 3,000 deaths from 58 Countries (as reported in the most recent news from the World Health Organization – 2nd March 2020), Covid-19 is testing our societies’ health systems, governments, and economies. And of course, it is challenging their resilience capacity.

It is still early to evaluate whether our societies will show capable of facing this emergency at best. In the meanwhile, it is of primary importance to highlight that, also in this occasion, the key for resilience is the engagement of the whole community – including the most vulnerable citizens – as advocated by the AMARE-EU project.

In these times of emergency, we should keep in mind that “in facing a difficulty which affects everyone, we can see a great chance: we can put aside the dysfunctional inclinations which characterize us in ‘non-emergency’ times and find a new dimension, capable of ‘bringing out the best’ from each one. The aid machine in an emergency context can teach us a lot about how to operate when there is no emergency” (Sandra Federici, Preface to the special issue of Africa e Mediterraneo n. 91 on “Emergency, Community and Resilience”, forthcoming).

This emergency can help our society becoming more “antifragile”, to use the term coined by the Lebanese philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb: presented with several unforeseen attacks, human beings must count on their relationships, on the multiple attachments they are linked to, to be able to front stressful events and turn them into a precious source of information and growth.

And also in this case, it is important not to forget who is not native from the place where (s)he lives or is not perfectly fluent with local language. Here an example of what has been prepared by the Italian association Il grande Colibrì, to explain Coronavirus disease and related emergency measures in Italy to non-Italian people.

Photo: Disinfection of Tehran subway wagons against coronavirus / Credits: Fars News Agency – Creative Commons