The blood prophecy hanging over Ceuta and the pandemic

The blood prophecy hanging over Ceuta

What were people in Ceuta talking about before 2020 swept away every other forecast? That blood was going to be spilled, literally. The material circulating these days revives a handful of warnings written centuries before elbichito: from a text attributed to John of Jerusalem in the 11th century to the words of a 2015 author who pointed to asylum seekers from Africa as the main cause of disease spread in Europe.

Prophecies that don't stand up to scrutiny

The catalogue has it all: an "Elder Antonio" who in 1970 warned of an invasion and cities full of the sick; Benjamín Solari Parravicini, the Argentine painter, with his line about the bacterium unleashed in a terrible war; and numerological predictions that turn the time 01:04 into a supposed key. These are quotes with no verifiable primary source, passed from one compilation to another and used as an appeal to authority. None predicted SARS-CoV-2 accurately, but they all seem to fit when read after the disaster.

Real exhaustion weighs more than prophecies

Not everything is speculation. Those who lived through the second and third waves in hospitals describe hell. The healthcare workers who endured it leave a warning the authorities would do well to heed: faced with another similar deployment, many would request unpaid leave or resign from their posts. It is the only risk with direct witnesses, and it needs no oracles.

Meanwhile, the analysis moves to institutional ground: the state of alarm (Spain's emergency regime), exception and place. Some argue the constitutional resources were exhausted almost immediately; others believe they were never even used. And in the background, the uncomfortable question that opens it all: are they allowed to make their TikToks with their choreographies?

The problem with quoting a medieval prophet is that he doesn't answer when things go well. The problem with 2020 is that things went badly enough that everyone found their favourite seer. Blood, literally, was spilled in the hospitals. There, nobody needed a prophecy to know it was coming.