A year of Covid in Italy: from the Chinese couple’s hospitalization at Spallanzani to today

A year has passed. It was the evening of January 29, 2020 when two Chinese tourists were admitted to the Spallanzani hospital in Rome, the first case of Covid in Italy. It was Prime Minister Conte who announced to the Italians on January 30: “The first two cases ascertained in Italy are Chinese tourists”.

The two inmates were a 67-year-old man and a 66-year-old woman, married. They had symptoms, they came from Wuhan and the swab confirmed that it was Sars-Cov-2.

Until that time there had been no known cases in Europe. On 21 February there would have been the so-called patient one, the first Italian infected, in Codogno. It will be discovered long after the virus had already been circulating for the previous months, even before the outbreak of the economy in Wuhan, China.

Since then, in the world, there were 2.2 million deaths and entire nations go through more or less rigid lockdown periods, wherever there are hospitals in difficulty, masks to be worn compulsorily, gathering bans, cinemas and closed theaters. Then unimaginable.

The Chinese spouses remained in the Roman hospital until March 19, passing through intensive care and sedation. Their case is exemplary: they came from the region of the only known outbreak in the world then, they had traveled smoothly to Malpensa and they had already toured half of Italy before experiencing symptoms at the Hotel Palatino, a Roma.

The day after their hospitalization, flights from China were blocked. It was only the first of a series of restrictive measures that would have disrupted life as we knew it. From March following the lockdown, even before the red zone of Codogno and Lodi, the schools closed, all locked in the house for months.

It seems like a lifetime has passed since then, precisely because everyone’s habits have been overturned. Italy and the rest of Europe and the world still live today a suspended reality with restaurants closed, with the impossibility of traveling, with so much school still far away, with swimming pools and gyms that cannot be reached, cinemas and theaters with barred doors.

Until the vaccine for most of the population, experts say, nothing will change and return to the way it was before. The hope is that we don’t have to wait long because this year, made up of days all the same, seems to have lasted a century.

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