Italy is nearly back to normal!

Friday, August 14, 2020

On March 27th, 2020, a horrible Covid-19 pandemic hit Italy tremendously when the civil protection authorities declared that 969 people lost their lives in just 24 hours. Images of large number of coffins stacked up in church parlors and being driven down Bergamo streets in a caravan of military trucks poured into the homes of Italians, by then lockdown was almost three weeks continuing.

Four months later, life in Italy, the country Vice President Mike Pence explained “no one wanted to be like,” is virtually normal, in spite of infrequent spikes in new cases that have been caused due to migrants coming to the country or living in close quarters.

The mortality rate has reached at just over 35,000; with the number of new reported deaths at the present is less than a dozen most days. The total number of cases now at 250,103 with daily increments in the low hundreds at most.

In Italy, nightclubs and schools are yet to be reopened, face masks are mandatory and social distancing is compulsory as well, however, summer is in full swing here. As a result, people are going out for dinner at restaurants, enjoying time in Open Square, going on vacation and moving ahead. It’s nothing short of a miracle, particularly in comparison to Brazil and the United States, where the pandemic is still on rise.

Before March, when almost 1,000 people died, stories about how Italians were avoiding the lockdown were rampant. Stories of secret dinner parties and entire apartment blocks walking the same dog just to get outside exposed Italian national’s pastime in bending the rules. By that time, the lockdown had meant that everyone except the essential of workers was confined to within just 300 meters of their homes.

People have become jobless, businesses suffered immensely and children lost valuable time as the ill-funded education system of Italy fought hard to adapt to online teaching. However as hard as it was, the images of the dead, of the congested hospitals, loving grandmothers and grandfathers dying alone created an unimaginable national sorrow and scared the entire country, says Gianni Rezza, director of the National Health Institute.

“The population reacted quite positively in the first phase, however fear probably played a role,” he told CNN. “Images of the coffins carried on military trucks in Bergamo were harsh, and evidently they made it clear how leaving the uncontrolled circulation of the virus would lead to serious problems.”

Things got better with time from that horrible day, with daily cases, ultimately hitting a plateau and dropping to an insignificant number of daily infections. People understood the importance of lockdown, wore masks as they continue to do today, and the country gradually bounced back to normal.

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