A personal plea

After watching Italy suffer for weeks and continue to suffer, I don’t want the same thing to happen anywhere else. Please take this seriously, if not for yourself then for your loved ones and the vulnerable. We will all get through this and it will end, but only if we unite and take action for the common good. Please practice social distancing as much as you can. 

What a surreal world we are living in right now. Covid-19 has reached almost every corner of the globe it seems, and all of it feels like we are living in a movie. This is something I would’ve never predicted or imagined, I don’t think anyone could have. My mom compared the uncertainty of right now to how they felt after 9/11 (I was only in kindergarten). I have never known this kind of uncertainty in my life. The anxiety of how close to home it is now, along with the fact that we have no set timeline of when it will be over, is crippling sometimes. It’s true, I don’t know what the long term effects of this will have, I know it will be innumerable, but right now we are still in it and it is drastically affecting our day-to-day (if you disagree with this, then you aren’t doing what’s best for everyone and staying home as much as possible). 

I have felt a particular need to have a strong voice and speak up about the spreading of coronavirus because I have witnessed how it spread in Italy from the very beginning. I strongly can recall the Sunday morning that I woke up and heard there were a few cases in the country. The news continued to get worse in the following days but was really only affecting the northern part of the country. The first shock came with Venice’s Carnevale being cancelled, then all museums closing there. At that point, everyone was concerned what toll Venice’s economy would take when it lost all its tourists. My sister and her friend had planned their spring break trip from London, where they were studying abroad, to Italy but chose to cancel. More so for fear of being stuck there rather than catching the virus. At this point everyone was still living under the pretense of “it’s just the flu.” And boy do we know now how fast that changed. 

Over the next days and weeks I heard from my friends in Italy how it progressed. Many of them urged me not to worry when I expressed concern, that they were staying home or limiting when they went out, but were okay. Then the lockdown began just days later with my friends near Verona and Venice, as Lombardia and the Veneto were the hardest hit. Universities closed and my friends stayed home. My host family and friends in Rome, and those I know in Florence, were still living quite normally. My best friend took a trip down to Palermo, her friends wearing masks as they traveled but with no real concerns at this point.

This changed quickly as the number of cases went up and measures were taken across the country to keep people one meter apart, and to stop the common greeting of a double kiss on the cheek. Both are hard things to tell Italians, who are the most social people I know. Now I saw tour guides and Italian travel agents expressing grave concern for what the virus was already doing to their business, their livelihoods. Another friend, whose family owns one of the most famous cafes in the center of Rome, also shared her concerns with the city completely emptied of tourists for the first time ever. It felt like hours after I saw photos of bars with tape on the floor, the decree went out that everything must close except for grocery stores, markets, gas stations, & pharmacies, as it is still today. 

This was of course a huge shock, and a few of my friends made it out (to go back to their home countries) just in time, as flights ceased shortly after. For me this was unprecedented, to have people I know fleeing a country because of a pandemic. But then even more shocking news continued. The number of cases had soared and the lockdown was put in place by the government because the hospitals were absolutely inundated with people, and still are. A leaked voice message from a nurse, which I heard, described the lack of ventilators and necessary supplies for those who need assistance breathing. It came out that doctors were having to choose who to save (the young) and who would die (the old), just as they had to do in times of war. Other patients in critical condition couldn’t receive the help they needed because of the overflow and lack of resources. This is not to blame the Italian healthcare system, which is ranked among the top in the world, but rather because no healthcare system is prepared for an epidemic of this magnitude. As soon as this came out, on the first few days of quarantine, many Italians began crowdfunding campaigns to help the hospitals get the necessary supplies they need, and new wards are being built in record time to hold patients, as they had to do in China. Respirators are still in high demand as they are costly and not necessarily readily available. A video recently came out showing the obituaries in Bergamo, a small city near Milan that has been hit hard. More than 13 pages were flipped through, full of names of those who had died the day before. This continues to be their reality and everyday at 6 pm, those in Italy anxiously wait for the latest statistics to be published. They know it will get worse before it can get better. My Instagram friend Rachel, who lives in Florence, told me today that in Tuscany they only had 85 cases, which is down 160 or so from the previous day.  

After watching Italy suffer for weeks and continue to suffer, I don’t want the same thing to happen anywhere else. Please take this seriously, if not for yourself then for your loved ones and the vulnerable. I for one am terrified, because of seeing the attitudes of Italians in the beginning just as some Americans are treating it now. Everyone needs to wake up and face the reality of this fast-moving pandemic. We will all get through this and it will end, but only if we unite and take action for the common good. Please practice social distancing as much as you can. If possible, just stay at your house and only leave to go on a walk away from people or to the grocery store if necessary. Until we are in a government-induced quarantine like Italy, it is up to everyone to take responsibility for the help of the greater good. 

As I write this, the Italians have completed one week of their country-wide quarantine, and many other countries and cities have also gone into lock down. Spain, France, the UK, New York, and many other cities across the US…the list grows and the number of cases increases. Schools are closing, people are moving to remote work, and hospitals are cancelling elective surgeries to prepare. Are we prepared? No. But if we learn from the lessons of China and Italy and take as many preventative measures as we can, then maybe we will survive this a little better than them. It’s hard to say now, but I for one was relieved to hear just tonight that restaurants and bars will be closed (here in Minnesota and many other states) because I hope it further enforces the idea for people to STAY HOME. I don’t want the same thing to happen to us as in Italy. Please listen to me, and to those who learned how much they would pay for taking the situation lightly.

#iorestoacasa #imstayinghome

I know that we will make it through this and the best way is by being positive, so I will be sharing more posts in the coming days that are lighter and offer suggestions and resources for the next few weeks or months of our lives. First I needed to write this, not just to get it off my chest, but because I understand that with having a voice comes responsibility, and I never want to be one to standby when I could’ve spoken up. I hope you all understand.