Συστημένο από τον Καβάφη στους προύχοντες

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

      The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating? Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

The prediction models fed with data riddled by sensationalism and other bias compelled us to prepare for a tsunami level wave of people requiring hospital care. Existing Hospitals were transformed, new hospitals were purpose-built and inaugurated by ‘consuls and praetors’.

‘Τα γούστα πλερώνονται’ παντού και πάντα.

The price for such an adjustment is high and crucially not just monetary. The mortality and morbidity from averting people with usual illnesses from hospitals is a pragmatic reality that we are only just starting to contemplate and face. The eye watering ‘bill’ inevitably has to be paid… but how much is it? The fiesta or fiasco isn’t over yet.

During the fervent preparation weeks leading to our complete stand still in terms of heart operations I frequently looked out of my office window towards the city centre. I was trying to visualise this tsunami level wave (this brutal barbarian endorsed by the experts) coming towards the hospital and engulfing everything. Now that we have ‘passed the peak’ we realise that the highest height of the waters in this city was a rather underwhelming ankle deep.

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home lost in thought?Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say there are no barbarians any longer.

We are now trying to surgically curve a path towards normality and that for us is performing heart operations to prolong people’s lives and/or improve their quality thereof. But people are afraid of coming to the media-painted ‘infested’ hospitals more than the heart surgery itself.

Και τώρα τι θα γενούμε χωρίς βαρβάρους, αυτοί οι άνθρωποι ήσαν μια κάποια λύσις.