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Two days ago, Murat Çınar, a jour­nal­ist resid­ing in Italy, pub­lished infor­ma­tion on the dai­ly aspects of the coro­n­avirus epidemic.

Since then, the sit­u­a­tion has evolved every­where in Europe.


Italy is the Euro­pean coun­try most impact­ed cur­rent­ly by the new gen­er­a­tion Coro­n­avirus (Covid-19). As of March 12, 12 839 peo­ple were diag­nosed and of these, the ill­ness had caused the death of 1 016 people.

In his dec­la­ra­tion on the evening of Sun­day March 8, the Pres­i­dent Giuseppe Con­te, announced a quar­an­tine extend­ing to the whole coun­try, “we declare the entire coun­try a red zone,” he said. No trips are autho­rized, except if moti­vat­ed by pre­vi­ous­ly con­firmed pro­fes­sion­al and med­ical rea­sons. All cul­tur­al, sports and social activ­i­ties are can­celled. Peo­ple can­not leave their homes with­out spe­cif­ic pass­es and for those who work, the oblig­a­tion exists to do so from their home when­ev­er possible.

So what is dai­ly life like in Italy? What has hap­pened since the appear­ance of the first case a month and a half ago? How do the media and the pop­u­la­tion see the pro­gres­sion of events?

torino coronoavirus murat cinar italie

Murat Çınar

Jour­nal­ist Murat Çınar lives in Tori­no, neigh­bor­ing Lom­bardy, in the North of Italy where the great­est num­ber of cas­es have been observed.

First encounter with the virus

The first case was revealed on Jan­u­ary 30 with two affect­ed Chi­nese tourists in a hotel in Rome. They were imme­di­ate­ly quar­an­tined and treated.

At that time, the gov­ern­ment did not pro­vide health infor­ma­tion and the pop­u­la­tion had not yet under­stood the seri­ous­ness of the sit­u­a­tion. There were no warn­ings such as “these per­sons may have trans­mit­ted the virus, be cau­tious.” This went on until Feb­ru­ary 21 in the North­ern Lom­bardy region of Italy where sud­den­ly, cas­es began appear­ing rapid­ly; two in the morn­ing, then, five, then nine in the evening. Since that day, we have been in the cur­rent situation.

This is the rich­est region in Italy. More­over it is also the region with the most con­tacts with Chi­na both eco­nom­i­cal­ly and in terms of tourism. And indeed, 76% of the deaths occurred in Milan, Lom­bardy’s cap­i­tal. Cur­rent­ly the 14 large cities under quar­an­tine serve as a buffer zone around Lombardy.

Mainstream and new media

If you lis­ten to tra­di­tion­al main­stream media, they tend­ed to pan­ick until Mon­day March 9th, with “flash” news, head­lines on the increas­ing num­ber of cas­es and of deaths. Fol­low­ing Con­te’s speech on Sun­day March 9, the num­ber of cas­es and of deaths no longer appear in any of the news­pa­pers’ headlines.

But the struc­ture of media has changed also. One could even say that What­sapp is a new media source. Fake infos, fake images and sound record­ings abound. “I am a doc­tor work­ing in such and such a place… The sit­u­a­tion is cat­a­stroph­ic,” that type of shar­ing keeps on spread­ing. In Turkey, events will prob­a­bly play out in the same way. And peo­ple in whom you trust, or that you call “jour­nal­ists” spread these things. This reached tremen­dous pro­por­tions in the last week. I had to block sev­er­al peo­ple for that reason.

Inform­ing with­out a con­science, or focal­i­sa­tion only on the neg­a­tive is not ben­e­fi­cial. For exam­ple, cur­rent­ly, the num­ber of patients being treat­ed is increas­ing. By omit­ting cov­er­age of the top­ic under that angle, fears increase.

Panic in the population

Final­ly, many peo­ple are seri­ous­ly pan­icked. I have friends who have not left their home since March 1st and who check their tem­per­a­ture every half hour. An unknown agent is spread­ing and, of course, this cre­ates a cli­mate con­ducive to pan­ic. There is also quite a bit of Sino­pho­bia in Italy. This is a sick­ness com­ing out of Chi­na and every­thing com­ing out of Chi­na — excep­tion made for iPhones — leads to the awak­en­ing of a strange fear.

Dur­ing the first days, super­mar­ket shelves were picked clean. Fol­low­ing Con­te’s declar­ing the entire coun­try a “red zone” 7/24 mar­kets were also emptied.

Two days ago, I noticed that super­mar­kets, for health rea­sons, were autho­riz­ing access to small groups of cus­tomers at a time. Those inside had to leave before a new group could enter. Inside the super­mar­ket, reg­u­lar mes­sages advise cus­tomers to main­tain a min­i­mum dis­tance of one meter one from the oth­er. Stocks were almost com­plete on the shelves. The only short­ages were in san­i­tary prod­ucts such as hand gels and jav­el water. Of course you can buy these online, although their cost is a bit higher.

There is no seri­ous prob­lem in Tori­no. But in Lom­bardy, just next door, res­i­dents have been clois­tered for 15 days. They go out at spec­i­fied times to run errands and go back home. We haven’t reached that point here yet.

Daily Life

Five days ago, we could still go out some­where for a drink. This is no longer pos­si­ble. The­ater, cin­e­mas, muse­ums, sports facil­i­ties, every­thing is closed. Yes­ter­day, bars and restau­rants were open until 6 PM. They have also been shut down since.

torino coronavirus

Pho­togra­phie: Fed­er­i­ca Tourn — Torino

We must now move around with a doc­u­ment. If we are going to work, this doc­u­ment spec­i­fies our iden­ti­ty, the hour we left home, des­ti­na­tion and time of return. For shop­ping also, we must have this autho­riza­tion. Police can con­trol you at any moment and if you do not have this doc­u­ment, you are at risk of a penal­ty. Frankly, the basic aim of these pre­cau­tions is to keep peo­ple in their homes. This doc­u­ment is valid as an indi­vid­ual dec­la­ra­tion. If you go to the super­mar­ket, you write down your address, where you are going and the depar­ture time and the time of return. The same applies to your work.

Are autho­rized to stay open: some fac­to­ries, super­mar­kets, phar­ma­cies, gas sta­tions, tobac­co and news­pa­per kiosks, shops sell­ing clean­ing prod­ucts, post offices, cer­tain banks, insur­ance com­pa­nies and laun­dro­mats. Couri­er ser­vices are also allowed to work. As for schools, they are closed since the begin­ning of March and will stay closed until April 3rd for the time being.

The Health System

In recent years in Italy, much of the health sys­tem has been pri­va­tized. This start­ed with “for sim­ple blood tests, instead of stand­ing in line, you go to such and such a place, in any event, it will be reim­bursed by the gov­ern­ment”, and now, from IRMs to light surg­eries, you are direct­ed toward the pri­vate sec­tor and pay the gov­ern­men­tal share. Pri­va­ti­za­tion has been pro­gress­ing rapid­ly for the past 15,20 years.

With the appear­ance of the virus, pri­vate estab­lish­ments were not pro­vid­ing any beds. Now, with the sit­u­a­tion reach­ing more seri­ous pro­por­tions, they do. We have thus seen that the State health ser­vices sup­posed to offer free ser­vice to the pop­u­la­tion were lim­it­ed. And yet, we are in a coun­try where health ser­vices are of a fair­ly high qual­i­ty. Even so, we can see that this is limited.

One of the fake news spread­ing at the moment says “in gov­ern­men­tal hos­pi­tals, they are not treat­ing the elder­ly in order to make room for younger patients”… This type of fake infor­ma­tion spreads quick­ly and rais­es jus­ti­fied fear about the hos­pi­tals. Per­haps this is sim­ply a mat­ter of lack of con­fi­dence in the health sys­tem. For exam­ple, a week ago, Con­te announced the hir­ing of 20 000 nurs­es. For there are not enough nurs­es presently.

Work

At the begin­ning of March a sys­tem called “smart work­ing” was acti­vat­ed for those who can work from home. In Italy, work­ing from home does not rest on clear legal grounds. Fol­low­ing the decree pro­mul­gat­ed by the Prime Min­is­ter, all those who can must now work from home. Those who can­not and whose pro­fes­sions are in vital areas con­tin­ue their nor­mal pro­fes­sion­al life.

At first , there was a void as far as insur­ances went. There were many ques­tions con­cern­ing work-relat­ed acci­dents occur­ring in the home… A decree was pro­mul­gat­ed to cov­er all these matters.

In his speech on Tues­day, March 10, the Min­is­ter of the Econ­o­my announced a sup­ple­men­tary bud­get of 25 bil­lion Euros and that no one would face unem­ploy­ment and no indus­try would go bankrupt.

We’ll see…

Lat­est fig­ures in Italy (as of March 12 2020):
15 113 diag­nosed cas­es, 1 258 healed, 1 016 deaths, 12 839 active patients.
Infec­tions on March 12: 2 651, deaths on March 12: 189, crit­i­cal con­di­tions: 1 153.
These fig­ures were obtained on the evening of this report, on March 12 2020 from the coro­n­avirus sec­tion on Worl­dome­ters.


Head­line pho­to: Fed­er­i­ca Tourn — Torino

Translation by Renée Lucie Bourges
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