COVID-19 Diaries: The Situation In Italy, 106 Days In

Italy has been reporting a consistent reduction in daily new cases of COVID-19 this month. Back in March however, this wasn’t the case with the country fresh in lockdown and hospitals worrying about how they were going to cope with the rapidly increasing number of infections. Here’s a look back at what the situation was like in Italy just a month ago, as told by Roberto who lives in the Umbria region of Central Italy. 

Q: (Asked on 16 March) Italy has been in lockdown for more than a week but infections have not slowed. How do you feel about it? Are people taking the lockdown seriously?

A: People are pretty scared. Grocery stores are open. You need to sign a declaration with the reason why you’re around to get there, though. There are people around… going to the grocery store, taking the dog out, having a walk with their children… But they keep much more than 1.5m among them.

My mindset about these arguments when they happened in Italy was “just relax, stay at home, be safe and wait a couple of weeks”. And it worked. Stressing out about it is a huge waste of time, some people won’t understand until it begins impacting them personally.

Under what conditions can a person go out?

If you’re out you must have a reason. They will stop you and you need to provide a signed declaration. Valid reasons are commuting to work and going to buy groceries/to the pharmacy. You’re also allowed to take the dog out and you must keep 1.5m from everyone.

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Can someone move from one city to another by showing a signed declaration?

They are pretty strict about town borders. You can only move for work, basically.

What happens if anyone breaks the rules?

There have been like 7000 people reported breaking the rules in 3-4 days. They’ll all face a big fine and could go to jail—also, they’ll have that on their records. Besides that, there is news saying a prison riot happened in Italy over the lockdown measures. Probably something organised by the Mafia. 12 inmates dead while 16 escaped. They’re probably back with their families and will be caught again in a while.

I found that the mortality rate for COVID-19 is very high in Italy. Why do you think that is the case? I read from the newspaper that it is because hospitals in Italy don’t have enough beds and ICU machines, is that true?

Regarding the higher lethality: It’s widely believed to be because of a combination of A—the bigger population of elderly people (average age in Italy is pretty high) and B—the fact that the infected are many, many more than reported. At least double the official number, according to The Lancet.

Probably many, many more are unreported. To get tested nowadays in most of Italy you need to be on the verge of death basically. So it’s not that it’s much more lethal here than in China, it’s that we’re only testing people who are coughing their lungs out. They don’t test you if you have symptoms but no history of contacts with a known infected person. Lots of people are reporting horrible flu with chest pain but until they need to be hospitalised they won’t be counted. Basically, we’re ignoring the mild cases.

We still have enough beds and pulmonary ventilators—not for long though. Especially in Lombardy, the situation is critical and they could have to choose who to save soon. That’s not happened yet though.

With regards to the elderly patients issue, I heard a rumour saying that hospitals in Italy are choosing to not treat the elderly because of shortages of resources. Another rumour said that the Italian government has been using trucks to send corpses to crematoriums. Is that true?

No one’s stopped treating the elderly yet, they just said it could happen if we don’t slow the infection down. That is basically fake news. However, the ordinary crematory could not deal with the corpses and the military had a lot of trucks available. That one is not rumour.

Why are there so many COVID-19 infections in Italy? How did most of those infected contract the virus and are there any big clusters?

At first the government tried to follow contacts starting from patient zero for a while, but it wasn’t useful as multiple infection chains appeared and many are untraceable. Thus they failed to contain the virus.

Tomorrow, we follow up with Thomas from Beijing who we interviewed at the beginning of the novel coronavirus outbreak in China to find out if the situation is indeed getting better over there as reports say. Follow the latest in our COVID-19 Diaries series here.

If you’re in a country that has been affected by the novel coronavirus and would like to share information about the situation where you’re at, do get in touch with us here.

Photographs courtesy and copyright of Adert. Interviewer: Kauai
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