The next day, the mayor was in his office in the center of Bergamo when the news began to emerge that a patient in an ambulance in Codogno, a city southeast of Milan and about an hour’s drive away, had tested positive for the coronavirus. The next day, a second case was confirmed in Alzano Lombardo, just a few minutes outside Bergamo.
In those long, harrowing days in late February, the coronavirus crisis seems to be bubbling up Bergamo’s people, and gathering strength until it consumes them as well. The city closed, the silence filled with sirens. The hospitals were overwhelmed. The local newspaper Fill with the names of the dead. The army was called in to remove the bodies. Soon memories of that night in San Siro drifted and disappeared, as if it had happened in another world.
“It was the last day of total ignorance,” Gori said. He had stopped smiling. “It was the last day we did not worry.”
A city’s solidarity
When the pandemic destroyed Italy in general, and the province of Bergamo in particular – Gori, the mayor, regretted that his city had become known as’ the ‘capital of Covid’ – the biggest victory in the history of Atalanta, which at the time turned out to be a night of joy and wonder, took on a far more dark connotation.
Massimo Galli, a virologist at Sacco Hospital in Milan, had suggested that 40,000 fans gathered in such a neighborhood had been a “major vector for infection”. Fabiano Di Marco, the chief pneumologist at Pope John XXIII Hospital in Bergamo, where he and his colleagues fought to save as many of the victims of the virus as they could, described it as a “biological bomb.”
In Bergamo, however, no one holds the team – as football as a whole – responsible for the evolving tragedy. Of course, Gori said, it’s wise to assume that ‘it was definitely an episode that contributed to its acceleration: all those people in the same place, whether it was in the stadium or gathering at home or in bars. to look . ”
But, he said, no one could be expected to know it. “As far as we were concerned, the virus was something that happened in China,” he said. ‘It was not what happened that night. That game was the 19th. The first confirmed case was the 20th. The virus was already here. ”
