Covid-19: How The Tragedy In Italy Is Affecting Everyday Life

The European nation didn’t heed warnings from China and is reeling from the consequences of that initial indifference

- Francesco Alberti

Italy has entered its fourth week of lockdown as the coronavirus pandemic claimed more than 13,241 victims as of April 3, 2020. For those of you who are not too familiar with my country, Italy has a population of 60 million people, or about one-twentieth of India’s.

What does it mean to live in isolation for weeks with the likelihood that it will be extended until the end of April?

Let me start from the beginning.

In mid-January we started hearing about this mysterious, never-seen-before pneumonia that was spreading in Wuhan, China. I don’t think anyone really understood what was going on, also because the Chinese authorities were not being fully transparent on the extent of the epidemic.

Faraway land

Most people had never heard of Wuhan so, for most of us it was something somewhere out there in Asia, a faraway place to the east of Europe. Then the news: the whole province of Hubei, with a population matching Italy’s, was in lockdown. This was a first wakeup call, but we put it on snooze. Even the powerful images coming out of Wuhan, a city that turned from a bustling commercial centre into a ghost town within a matter of weeks, were not enough to make us realise the extent of the problem. Police and the army patrolled the city, stopping and arresting those who broke the quarantine. Hospitals were built in less than two weeks and tens of thousands of people were hospitalised. But the feeling was that yes, it was bad, but it was in China, thousands of kilometres away.