The COVID-19 pandemic revealed two serious problems that the state has experienced and neglected during 30 years of Independence. These are the sanitary system and the education system whose problems attracted society’s attention. Within these systems, radical changes should be mandatorily made, editor Gheorghe Erizanu, of the Cartier Publishing House, stated in the talk show “Moldovan society amid pandemic: lessons learned, lessons to be learned”, which was staged by IPN News Agency.
Gheorghe Erizanu said society and the state are obliged to learn lessons from such situations like the crisis caused by the pandemic, either they want or not, as the crisis revealed that we have a weak state. “We haven’t felt it directly earlier, but now experience it the hard way. We are obliged to try to build or to live in honest coexistence after the pandemic - the citizens of the Republic of Moldova and the state. The problem actually appears here,” he stated.
According to Gheorghe Erizanu, in such situations the citizens who pay taxes to the state budget and who look at the state as at a supreme power with authority before the individual wait for support from it. When the people find themselves in such crisis situations, they want the state to react and to help them. The businesspeople, event those who are liberal, are in this category. They say they accept the market economy, the situation in which the state should not become involved in regulations, but in the current situation the state is obliged to help them. Or they risk not surviving.
According to him, if the state had reacted more promptly at the first stage of the pandemic to support the citizens and businesspeople, the situation now would have been different. The economic sector was stopped suddenly for two months. As the pandemic continues because the number of new infections persists, the situation remains uncertain. The economy will try to recover, but the inactivity will continue. It will be hard and it is not clear who will survive.
Gheorghe Erizanu said the pandemic situation revealed problems that need to be solved. The education system, primarily the university stage, should be optimized as the universities now ‘yield’ graduates with certificates, not specialists. The teaching system in schools should be rethought and the lapses in the sanitary system should be removed. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed two serious problems that the state has experienced and neglected during 30 years of Independence - the sanitary system and the education system.
In another development, the editor said that when a pandemic comes to an end, the people return to the ordinary life with a much greater joy than earlier. Moreover, the great epochs of the world were delimited by crises of this kind. “World War I by the Spanish flu, World War II by typhus. Renaissance came after the plague of the Middle Ages,” he stated.
The debate “Moldovan society amid pandemic: lessons learned, lessons to be learned” was the 137th installment of the series of debates entitled “Developing political culture through public debates” that are supported by the Hanns Seidel Foundation.
