Is the death toll a loud enough Megaphone?
Today we had the highest death toll from Coronavirus to date: 475 people died - today. This brings the total deaths from Covid19 in Italy to 2,987. Unsurprisingly, the Ministry of the Interior announced that it’s considering outlawing outdoor physical activity altogether. So far, running or working out outdoors was permitted, as long as you did it alone. But the time has come to hang up our running shoes. Marathon training can wait. There are still too many people going out. Getting fresh air is still permitted, as long as you remain within a small radius of your house, but you cannot go too far afield from your residence. If too many people are congregating in one area, the police or military appear and shout out at people to go home over a megaphone. Megaphone notwithstanding, the message is still not getting through to some: Stay Home. While the rate of contagion is slowing a little, it’s still not enough (latest stats from Italy can be found here). We are told that this week is crucial for slowing down the virus. I sense that if things don’t improve, measures will become even more stringent.
When I was following the news from Wuhan, I remember thinking how insane it was that they had to build new hospitals to accommodate the sick. Never in my life did I think that in Italy we would be doing the same 3 months later. Plans to build a new hospital facility in Milan are well underway, and there is talk of two more, one in central and one in southern Italy. The government is calling for retired nurses and doctors to return to work. In Bergamo, the area hit hardest by the Coronavirus, there are no more hospital beds available. The town of Bergamo, which has about 120,000 inhabitants, has been ravaged by this pandemic. To put it in perspective, in the second week of March of 2019 23 people died, this year, in the same week there were over 300 deaths.
A few weeks ago, all this seemed inconceivable. But every day introduces us to a new and unsavoury reality. By now they have even found cases of Covid19 in West Virginia, the last of the American states to be affected. The moral: having a shotgun on your porch isn’t going to save you from this one. The other moral: take this virus seriously. I confess I didn’t at first and I regret it.