The summer that kills less. The health network holds against the heat, but the thermometer asks no one's permission

This year’s continental report says two things at once, and they need to be held together. First: heat kills more people in Europe than it did twenty years ago, because summers have worsened and no health network commands the thermometer. Second: where the branch’s network functions, it kills far fewer than it would otherwise. The two sentences do not contradict each other. They describe the thin margin on which everything turns.

In Seville that margin takes the shape of a continental protocol that triggers automatically. When the alert crosses the threshold, neighbourhood cooling points open, GPs call the elderly living alone first from their list, pharmacies hand out water and electrolytes without a prescription. It is a machine decided once at Union level and identical from Seville to Thessaloniki, which is why it does not depend on the current mayor remembering to think about it: the system thinks about it. The outreach worker doing her rounds tells me with a note of tired pride: “We get there before the ambulance. That is the whole job: getting there first.”

Getting there first saves many, not all. Last week, during the first peak, a seventy-six-year-old man died at home before the list reached him: he lived alone, did not answer the phone, no one had flagged him. The network is dense, not infallible, and every summer leaves a number that the reports print small. Anyone who says heat “no longer frightens” Europe has not read those numbers, or has not knocked on that door.

The margin remains, and it is real: thousands of people who will be alive in August because someone arrived first. They do not know it, and the living are not counted in the reports. Somewhere that same network does not exist, and the heat does the full count, alone, with no one arriving first. Here someone arrives. Not always in time. Almost always.