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In all these months I have never wanted to intervene in the difficult emergency that our country is going through. It was an unprecedented, complex and confusing situation, and the complexity and confusion often make concentration difficult. But after hearing Prime Minister Conte proclaim that the future of the epidemic will depend solely on our behavior, I felt the need to share some thoughts. I am not a denialist, I always wear a mask, I have a gel cartridge, I downloaded Immuni even though it has the same sociability as a polar bear. I am simply a person who has a habit of observing reality carefully and asking questions. The first question I asked myself in mid-January when the television started showing us images of the city of Wuhan. There was something deeply disturbing about that pressure, about that eager growth of intubated patients, of bulldozers digging day and night to build new hospitals. What does China mean to the world? I wondered and couldn’t answer myself. In those days that I was in the mountains, one morning I woke up with a strange feeling, I had swollen lymph nodes in my neck and a sore throat. I’m going to get the flu, I thought, but then it wasn’t like that, I came home with a bull’s neck that I couldn’t get over. One afternoon, while in the dim kitchen light, I was biting into a slice of bread covered in chocolate spread, I realized there was no taste. How was that possible? A few days later a Chinese doctor friend called me: knowing that my lungs were my weak point, he wanted to send me medicines to strengthen the immune system. “Put on the mask,” he said, “is the most important thing.” But how? All the media do nothing but tell us that it is useless, but he insisted: “Put on the mask.” Fortunately, as I am asthmatic and have had three severe pneumonias, I already had two available for my travels, but I knew from experience that they were very difficult to find. So when I learned in mid-February that we had given away, with Neapolitan generosity, two tons of medical supplies, including the masks unavailable to China, which produces them, I was shocked. It was enough to have a minimum knowledge of geography, history and hygiene to be aware that not only would the virus arrive, but perhaps it was already among us. Since the beginning of December 2019, in fact, I have received constant phone calls from friends and girlfriends telling me that they had a strong flu with a very high fever, terrible cough, useless antibiotics, ending with pneumonia and persistent weakness.
A little history. On January 29, the couple from Taiwan arrive in Rome with the coronavirus, we anxiously follow their conditions for weeks. Then, pop out of nowhere, on February 21, here’s Patient 1, the Codogno marathon runner. Actually, it was only the first diagnosis. No one clearly knew what to do. But how did our ministry not have a ready plan in case of an epidemic? However, we had had the avian, the Mers, the Sars, the mad cow disease … It would have been enough once again a little knowledge of biology and human history to realize that, feeling omnipotent thanks to technology We, nature we are always and only large mammals and, like all animal populations, we are subject to periodic epidemic diseases. The plague, cholera, diphtheria, typhus, and smallpox have changed the course of history. To keep the humblest diseases, whooping cough, scarlet fever and measles, fortunately now defeated, have eliminated generations and generations of humans.
Meanwhile, infections are on the rise: after Codogno, Vo ‘Euganeo, Alzano Lombardo, the Red Zones multiply in the north, everywhere the sad spectacle of ambulances with sirens rushing towards crowded hospitals, newscasts turned into war bulletins, doctors and nurses quickly transformed into heroes – and heroes who were – but of a heroism not unlike the soldiers sent to Russia with cardboard shoes. March 9 comes the emergency shutdown throughout the territory. Suddenly we become a country under house arrest, the mask becomes a matter of life and death, but the masks are neither in the pharmacy nor on the internet, the few in circulation have already been seized by the most provident in February. Fortunately, we have a sewing machine at home, and thus we were able to stock up on handmade masks, like most Italians.
What we didn’t know then was that we would plunge into an obsessive and paranoid police state with the related stimulus to report., sad feature of all totalitarian regimes. Obviously, those who govern us see us Italians as an insane poor people in the grip of a collective. I want to be dissolved whose only wish was to infect each other. In fact, we have shown that we are responsible citizens who love life and have a healthy terror of disease, with the usual exceptions that support the rule. This summer, for example, when all the bans on outdoor masks had passed, in front of the small grocery store in my country, people continued to line diligently, separated, with their mouths and noses covered.
In mid-April, the long-awaited masks finally arrive. 12.50 euros each, immediate purchase, along with alcohol to disinfect them. After a few days I get a call from a friend who works with the public, she has a high fever, a cough and can barely breathe. On the phone, her doctor told her to take the tachipyrine and be quiet. Nobody visits her, treats her, cleans her, not even when she asks to go back to work. You will do it on your own as soon as possible. He had had Covid. Is it any wonder the large number of hospital admissions, given that the sick were left to fend for themselves and only intervened when the virus had already done its devastating job? For more than two months, from March to the end of May, we were nailed to the news to listen to the bulletins of the dead, witnessing helpless and saddened by the images that came to us from overloaded hospitals, disturbed by the Barnum media that, in a contest of protagonists and fights, he gave us a different interpretation of the events each night. We were, and are, governed in the emergency by a working group of hundreds of experts, but it is enough to have participated even once in a condominium meeting to know that the greater the number of participants, the more difficult it is to find an enlightened solution. for reasonableness.
I will fly over the benches with wheels and other amenities capable of causing more laughter than crying and I will slide directly into the month of September, when I went to Pordenone for the Literature Festival. It was Saturday and in the streets there were hundreds of people without masks enjoying their happy hour glued to each other, while all the events of the Festival were subjected to very strict distancing measures, completed with police to control the entry. Then taking a walk around the hotel, I came across two stainless steel doors, I thought it was a cold room, instead, surprise!, It was a church. A sign listed the new rules for mass: arrive half an hour early. Wait for them to escort you to the seat. Sit two meters away. Do not touch anything. Don `t sing. Do not kneel. Don’t say “amen” after communion so as not to spread deadly droplets. How did this new decalogue fit in with the lively and happy crowd outside the bars? It just didn’t fit.
And I did not want to talk about the phantom supplemental funds or the money that is given to the rain, without any discernment., even for those who have continued to work and have not suffered any harm from Covid. On Easter Day, a holiday canceled for the first time in Church history due to the emergency shutdown, a man over eighty years of age was fined by the police for going to his parish, wearing gloves and a mask, to take the Eucharist for his seriously ill wife. “I pay the fine,” he wrote in a newspaper, “because I am an honest citizen but in all this matter it would have cost me a little come out of grain“Grain of salt, yes, some common sense, where to find it?
We now face new terrorist limitations. Schools have resumed, contagions are flying and transportation is inadequate for distancing. You didn’t know. Couldn’t you have imagined the situation before? Even in these new arrangements, discernment seems totally absent. We find out that the virus is a vampire, it wakes up only at midnight and whoever wants to challenge it must have another self-certification. Now there is fear of closing the regions again, as if between one region and another were the old Berlin Wall.
The impression is that those who rule us sail on sight. One hit to the rim and another to the barrel. First he prohibits something, then he gives up and gives it away a little, without a program, without a line, without anything that clarifies what is really better to do for the common good. But viruses do not know the circle, they continue with obstinacy and imaginative stubbornness and, since we are at this point of contagion and the vast majority of citizens religiously wear masks, perhaps they also make fun of the patches that we put on our faces.
It would be nice if, instead of the resumption of the Barnum media, with the daily terrorist broadcast of data On what nobody clarifies and that only creates confusion and fear in the population, they told us some simple things, but correct, as Merkel did. I know several people who have been infected in the last few weeks. Some have no symptoms, others have the symptoms of a normal seasonal flu. Our knowledge about the virus in recent months has deepened, we know that the concomitance with certain pathologies makes it especially dangerous, and that therefore people who suffer from it should be more careful, because we also know that now there is a derived treatment protocol proven effective. The Covid virus is not Ebola, whose mortality is 50%, its mortality rate is between 0.6 and 0.3%. Why not repeat it, instead of making eager new forms of punishment hover over our heads? No one doubts that the situation is serious and that is why we want our institutions to be affected by the same beneficial virus, that of gravity. Regions like the one I live in were already in financial difficulties before the epidemic, but without meaning emergency shutdown now they have been pushed into the abyss. China has not closed off the entire nation, only the Wuhan region and the same could have been done in Italy, given the longitudinal layout of the country and disparity in population and economic conditions. Umbria, Basilicata, Molise, Calabria, for example, regions that have fewer inhabitants than a district of Milan, without industries or means of transport, which survive thanks to a little agriculture and a lot of illegal work, had no need. submit to the same treatment as in Lombardy. We certainly can’t afford a new one emergency shutdown at the national level, families are in a condition of poverty that perhaps the political class cannot even imagine. In addition to everything, the damage to collective health has not yet been assessed, especially for people of a certain age because over the years the absence of movement and sociability opens the door to all kinds of pathologies. When I received the medicine package sent by my Chinese friend at the end of February, I called him to thank him. “But besides the mask and the medications you gave me, what else can I do to avoid getting sick?” “The most important thing is not to be afraid of getting sick. Anxiety and fear are the greatest enemies of health because they are capable of breaking the immune system.
October 24, 2020 (change October 24, 2020 | 22:05)
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