Serena V.

Hi, my name is Serena and I graduated from the University of Medicine and Surgery of Turin last July. I live in the North of Italy which has been heavily struck by the Coronavirus infection.

In the past month so much has changed that it feels surreal, nobody expected such a quick escalation of events, and that is where our mistake was. When the infection was limited to Asia it felt like such a distant threat, one that could not really spread to us, an evolved country, miles away from the epicentre. But distances today are not as relevant as in the past and the virus soon arrived in Lombardy, the most globally-connected Italian region, with a frenetic business life. However, even when that happened, people in adjacent regions were naïve and kept on living as they used to. The government started closing schools and Universities and to lock down the more affected areas, forbidding to everyone to leave their homes except for necessities such as grocery shopping or going to the doctor.

Right now, this has been extended to the whole country. When people leave their home to run errands or to go to work, they have to do so alone, bringing with themselves an auto-certification stating the reason for being out. If they are stopped by the authorities and do not have a good enough motive, they can face a fine whereas if people who tested positive to the virus and are in house confinement are found outside their homes, they risk jail time. Nonetheless, people seem to not understand the seriousness of the situation and keep on going out and meeting in groups, even if the majority of the shops are closed.

All the University courses and exams are suspended, exams and graduation dissertations are held via Skype. I have classmates who, after 6 years of studying, could not celebrate this important moment with all their friends and relatives, but now everyone has started to understand that this emergency is the priority. And besides, it made for some really funny pictures of graduates sitting at their desks, becoming doctors with their pyjama bottoms on.

Now, classes will be held in videoconference, and even elementary schools are sending material through the school portals so parents can home-school their children. A lot of people are not going to work; just factories, supermarkets, pharmacies and administrative offices are open with the requirement of a 1 meter-distance between workers and the use of PPE (personal protective equipment).

This is going to greatly affect our economy, and, the government together with the European Union, is trying to find a solution. However, there is no shared opinion on how this matter should be handled and our President of the Republic is now calling for unity between the different parties, since this problem can be solved only by channelling our forces in the same direction. The major crisis is, however, the collapsing health system. We have the luck of being a country with free health care, but right now the system is struggling to keep up with the infection rate. There are not enough ICU beds to accommodate all the patients who need respiratory support and even doctors are falling sick. In the hospitals, all ambulatory practise is suspended as well as non-lifesaving surgeries, in order for more ventilators to be available. Entire hospital wards are being transformed to host Covid-19 patients, but even that is not enough. The patients are not admitted if not in severe condition, resulting in a delay in aggressive treatment that makes doctors’ work even more difficult. Additional staff is being employed but sometimes it includes also unspecialised doctors without the right level experience or health practitioners outside their area of expertise. Furthermore, there is a deficiency in PPE that makes their job unsafe which, combined with the shortness in ICU equipment, started the talk of converting some industrial factories to now manufacture the material we need.

The scary thing is that we haven’t reached the peak yet, we have already more deaths than China including young victims and this quarantine is going to last longer than we thought. Our only hope is that the stricter measures recently implemented will help to slow down the infection rate. However, in these weeks I think we, as a Nation, have regained our identity and are now realizing the impact that the actions of every single one of us have on the community. Various initiatives were born to show support to others in need and we started reconnecting with our neighbours to see if anyone might need help or even just to talk from balcony to balcony to feel like we are not in this alone.  Italy is going to need a big collective effort to recover from this shutdown, but I like to think we will manage to recover and that we’ll come out of this struggle as a more united nation.