After the first landing in China, Italy was for many weeks the western epicenter of the viral attack on our lungs and our civilization. Whole human categories are paying an heinous price, especially the elderly, doctors, nurses, city dwellers, lonely people left on the margins of the assistance network. The primacy of contagion has passed to the United States, Spain will soon approach the standards of our daily war bulletins, the black shadow is also extending in Germany, France and Great Britain.
In his diary from a quarantine on Republic, Paolo Rumiz writes: “Never as today does anyone who knows how to sing in chorus come out”. It does not seem the turn that Europe is taking, to stop us in our courtyard. It would like to be, at least in its intentions, the path chosen by Italy, with measures increasingly stringent, extended without differences to the entire national territory. But the differences in the intensity of the infection are all right and perhaps the time would have come to take them into account. Lombardy, for example.
Despite the understandable willingness to spread a bit of optimism from Governor Fontana (“I think he is starting the descent”), the locomotive region of the country alone now counts, and not from today, more than half of both the infected and the total deaths. The part of Italy where it all began (February 21, patient one in Codogno) has turned into just over a month in the mouth of the volcano where the brightest red of the entire nation is concentrated. You can see it with the naked eye on any map: the most intense spot of Covid-19 lies in a narrow circle between Milan, Bergamo and Brescia, with a macabre halo that extends to touch the borders of Veneto and Piedmont.
A great old man of scientific research like Silvio Garattini just warned yesterday: “It was necessary to close earlier, now it is medical staff and workers who pay.” He then added an uncomfortable but unavoidable truth: “The meaning of life comes before the meaning of business. But someone has reversed the priorities”. The result of this reversal of values, justified by the attempt to at least partially avoid the announced economic collapse, is tempering very little the drift of the production crisis while it is greatly aggravating the inventory of the victims.
Even after the agreement with the unions that led to a narrowing of the permitted activities, hundreds of thousands of workers still circulate in the industrious Lombardy, only partially linked to the indispensable supply chain that guarantees food, the health system and pharmacies. They are women and men who leave the house, reach the factory or warehouse or workshop with public or their own transport, offer themselves infinite possibilities of contagion, and then return in the evening to homes where perhaps family members who are respecting the delivery are waiting for them. of the long quarantine.
This is not the time for trials, nor for the attribution of responsibility. But it is the time, yes, of the courage to make strong decisions. Without prejudice to the strictly necessary activities, the hypothesis of drastically closing the entire Lombardy region for two weeks, asking for a further but not deferable sacrifice to those who live there, to those who work there, should go with responsibility, and also urgently. owners of small and medium-sized enterprises understandably frightened by the idea of not being able to start again. Any hypothesis of reconstruction after this abyss passes through clear decisions that put the salvation of lives at the top of the priorities, and therefore the containment of contagion, through the construction of embankments designed where the disease most rages. Beyond any political or financial consideration. Beyond any calculation of convenience. Save Lombardy to save Italy. Before it’s really too late.
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