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Thank you for the update @lermontov
It is like being in those catastrophic films showing the world after a nuclear war.
It is like being in those catastrophic films showing the world after a nuclear war.
I am in Parma, a city in the North-west, very close to the epicentre of the infection. We are entirely shot down since two weeks now, and the number of infected and deaths is boosting.
Our university hospital, despite being among the best of Italy, and probably of the world, is on the edge of collapse.
Here we see the effect of political decisions which favoured "excellence" and "quality" against "average" and "quantity".
It is now clear that it had been better to have more beds in intensive care units, equipped just with basic equipment, instead of having only a few, equipped with best-in-world technologies.
Same for personnel, of course. It highly qualified and skilled, but numerically insufficient for dealing with the present crisis.
Our university has "closed number" at admission at medical professions (both medical doctors and nursery), and trains them incredibly well. The closed number is due to the fact that our health system only hires a small number of people. To the point that some of our doctors emigrate to other countries (where they are usually highly praised and requested). Now we suddenly understand that this pursue of "excellence" made while cutting funds for the health system was wrong.
Here a photo of the situation in our hospitals (from the local newspaper "La Gazzetta di Parma"):
As you see, personnel has to wear high protection suits all the day, which makes even breathing difficult.
The city is deserted. Today is a warm, sunny day, in a normal period the city would be fully of people gathering around (typically using bicycles, as Parma, together with Ferrara, is known as a "bicycle town").
Here a photo of our main square, Piazza Garibaldi:
The only vehicles around are police and ambulances. It is scaring.
People can exit from house only for purchasing food or medicines. They must keep distance and the entrance in food shops is regulated, so there are widely-spaced queues in front of them:
The good thing is that there is no food shortage (also because Parma is called "the food valley"). Here inside one of our best food shops, La Beccheria:
Personnel is wearing masks and gloves, customers not always.
Staying weeks in home and having purchased a lot of food "for safety" is causing a lot of people eating and drinking too much. This will possibly cause a wave of secondary health problems in the next weeks.
TV and Internet are bombarding us with just one message: STAY HOME!
Most people organised for working from home: this required to convert suddenly a lot of procedures to their electronics equivalent. Italy was quite slow adopting IT technologies, in comparison with other countries of similar size and wealth such as Japan or South Korea.
This emergency is forcing our companies and public administration to switch immediately to modern computer-based procedures, and this will be probably the only good thing resulting from the epidemic.
My son just graduated in IT engineering, and now he is receiving a large number of proposals of hiring, suddenly this is a highly required qualification.
Schools and university will probably stay closed for at least another month. This required to switch all the course to E-learning methods, and most teachers were not ready for this. I was lucky, as in past years i had already created video recordings of the lessons of all my courses at the university, so in half a day I managed to make all this material available to my students.
But E-learning is never the same as real lessons in classrooms or experiments done together with the students in the lab.
I fear that this forced interruption of normal activities will leave "holes" in their preparation.
So in the end here population is following strictly the government's recommendation, and we have good hopes to pass through this bad period without suffering large permanent damages, and minimizing the number of lives lost (in Parma till now we had approximately 80 deceased).
Here in Italy normal online food deliveries have now an estimated delivery times of 2 weeks after the order.
I have heard that in some parts of the US not only food is being a problem, but also TOILET PAPER...
