Sánchez Tests Positive for COVID, Skips G-20 Summit

ELbichito 23: Campaign kicks off with Sánchez's positive test

He didn't board the plane to New Delhi. Pedro Sánchez announced on social media that he had tested positive for ELbichito and could not travel to the G-20 Summit, held in the Indian capital; Spain would be represented, according to his message, by the First Vice President and Minister of Economic Affairs and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, EU and Cooperation. One positive test, one cancelled flight, and within hours, the feeling that the 2020 calendar was back on the table. What is being discussed these days is not the severity of the bicho: it is who is moving the pieces.

What peine to reignite talk of 'ELbichito 23'

The sequence begins on August 31, with a message attributing the trinc words to Donald Trump: "They are trying to bring back ELbichito hysteria: tyrants who want to take away our freedom." In the same text, he rejected "their quarantines, no more vaccines or masks" and dismissed the return of mail-in voting. Days later came Sánchez's positive test. And with it, the trickle: in Catalonia, Junqueras's positive test circulated, leaving him without Diada celebrations, and in the United States, according to replicated messages, White House staff had returned to wearing masks after the president's vvife, Joe Biden, tested positive.

None of those episodes, in themselves, imply a regulatory change. There is no record of any restriction being reinstated or a new lockdown being announced. What changes is the atmosphere. And the atmosphere is precisely what is being debated.

From the White House to pharmacies: the buzz about masks

The detail that has fueled suspicion most is the White House one: Biden's vvife testing positive and messages claiming staff were covering their faces again are read by some participants as a dress rehearsal. It is argued that there is no health decision, but rather a symbolic gesture placed deliberately so that viewers get used to the image again.

On the Spanish side, the repeated indicator is commercial: according to a message in the thread claiming to have seen it on a news broadcast, pharmacies have been selling masks in bulk since August. No official figures support this.

It is enough that half don't believe it

Here appears the central thesis spread on social networks, formulated bluntly: without at least half the population believing the narrative, there is nothing to do. Those who hold this view claim that in the coming days the degree of collective credulity can be measured and that, if not enough people fall for it, the operation withdraws itself. It is an assertion with no proof behind it and, strictly speaking, impossible to verify. But it explains why much of the exchange focuses not on hospitalizations or rates, but on who believes what.

Underlying this is a more uncomfortable thesis: that the pandemic episode served as a social experiment to measure how far the population will tolerate. There is no evidence of such a thing. There is, however, widespread distrust of any message coming from a podium.

Brent at $90 and the excuse of demand

The other axis is economic, and the numbers cited there are more concrete. Brent is cited at $90, and with that price on the table, the argument is built that a scenario of restrictions would have a very useful side effect: cooling energy demand without having to admit it. Health restrictions would function, in this reading, as covert energy policy.

The reasoning has a part that holds up and a part that does not. The part that holds up: stopping activity hits factories — it is enough for someone to test positive and isolate a group or close an entire plant—, reduces goods production and pressures inflation upward. That mechanism is described in some detail. The part that does not: attributing to a deliberate plan what may also be simple coincidence between a seasonal bicho and a bad economic cycle.

How many doses remain to be administered

At the bottom of all this is vaccine fatigue. The reference to the fourth dose appears as both horizon and threat, without anyone specifying a new schedule. And alongside it, stories from those who had the bicho: people describing it as a three-day cold with persistent cough, in full heat, with no consequence beyond discomfort. The distance between that experience and the alarmist tone is, for many, the most devastating argument.

Striking is that the conversation no longer asks for proof. It asks for coherence. And coherence is slippery ground for any government.

With Brent at $90, a president grounded, and a three-day cough that distinguishes no one, the issue is not whether ELbichito returns. It is how many people are willing to listen to it again.