Of course, not even the wildest fantasy of a science fiction writer would have imagined a pandemic with a virus that when you seem to have cornered it changes its genome and begins to infect and spread again. On the other hand, our societies were not culturally ready for such events. We were stuck in the last Asian flu pandemic of the 1960s which caused 2 million deaths, 30,000 of which in Italy alone. This is the pandemic of globalization that is spreading at the pace of our movements and our needs.

Honestly, none of us expected a pandemic that would force us to change many things in our lives. We need to get over it and not complain about the "lost" time, but understand that our lives must continue within the difficulties that will never fail.

At the moment we have put aside the much more important issue of climate change. The pandemic mainly affects our lives, people and subsequently the economy, the standard of living, our freedoms. Climate change initially affects things, the environment, but only progressively our lives.

It is evident that the latter are tremendously more important and we must pay attention and commitment to them. All of us who have a smartphone have access to data provided by the European Air Quality Index. We find them in the Weather app. For each location the data is provided with a chromatic scale starting from blue and then green, yellow, red and purple. These chromatic data indicating air quality are followed by information on health, the risk for outdoor physical activity and the causes of the risk: PM2.5 particulates, ozone for traffic and the use of fossil fuels.

The data is under our eyes if we want to give it the weight it needs. The implication is our health. European Union studies speak of at least 307,000 premature deaths from low air quality. In Italy the victims would be 64 thousand (2019 data).

But there are still other important infectious diseases that we no longer see because we have adequate care. But we cannot ignore them because they are the sign of the disparities occurring on our planet. The World Health Organization estimates that 10 million cases of tuberculosis occur each year with 2 million deaths.