from our correspondent
BERGAMO – After three years, 13,640 deaths in the first nine months of 2020 alone (when in normal times there were just over 7,600) and a maxi investigation by the prosecutor, talking about Covid in Bergamo and the province stirs mixed feelings. There is the pain of those who have seen loved ones leave, the institutional balancing act in the face of the investigations – “We take note of it, justice will take its course”, comments the mayor of Alzano Lombardo, Camillo Bertocchi – the irresistible desire to forget everything. Which in many cases prevailed, considering that in the last elections the governor Attilio Fontana, harshly contested in the streets at the time of the epidemic, won here with 60.88%.
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THE STRUGGLES
Instead of remembrance, those who have made it their battle are the families of the victims, gathered in an association. “We don’t want revenge, we ask for justice,” they repeat. They suffered painful losses and felt abandoned, they paid 40 euros for masks and 60 oximeters. “People died at home without oxygen – says the committee’s lawyer Consuelo Locati, the father killed by the virus – Can you imagine what it means not to find anyone to explain how an oxygen tank works when we found it? What does it mean to invent sanitary fixtures to understand how much oxygen to supply to those who were hungry and could not even breathe?». Antonella Dell’Aquila also mourns her father, his name was Pietro and he died on April 6, 2020. «He fell ill on March 12, when it was still said it was a flu – she remembers – We treated him at home, without a tampon nor masks, until he was hospitalized. It was already too late. “We are accompanying him,” they explained to us on the phone. I saw it again in an urn in the cemetery of Alba, because in Lombardy there was no longer even room in cemeteries. I hope this sacrifice is not in vain, they are people, not numbers”.
Ended up in an accounting of pain that has its unit of measurement in the number of dead. In Nembro, in March 2020 alone, there were 152 deaths, five a day, in a country where there were usually twelve in the whole month. In Alzano 114 against 10, in Zogno 89 against 8.2, more than ten times the historical trend. In the early afternoon Rosa Brambati, 75, hurries for a visit to the hospital in Alzano. “Every time I come here my heart aches. My husband was hospitalized in general medicine in February 2020. He came in healthy and caught Covid. It doesn’t surprise me, here there was a coming and going of visitors and there were no precautions inside». According to the Bergamo prosecutor’s office, at least 36 (two of whom died) Pesenti Fenaroli employees would be infected due to the failure to adopt “all the technical, organizational and procedural measures” useful to “contain the spread of the virus” in the structure. «To say who made a mistake, in my opinion, will be really difficult. We should put ourselves in the position of those who saw all those sick people arriving», reflects Giuseppe Remuzzi, director of the Mario Negri Irccs Institute for Pharmacological Research. What we need to do now “is not to forget and equip ourselves, in these three years little has been done to secure our national health system”. Among those who have suffered from inexperience and loneliness is Salvatore Mazzola, a baker from Nembro. «We expected the red zone for Carnival. I took my clothes to the shop to move to live there and not bring Covid into the house. But nothing, they haven’t closed. My father was 81 years old, he was a former physical education teacher, he had a strong character and was very well. On March 9th he accuses the first symptoms, on the 17th he gets worse and they advise us to contact a toll-free number so as not to clog the already collapsing emergency rooms. They made me diagnose: “Are you breathing well? How many tachypirines do you take a day?”».
FEAR
In all of this, Salvatore says, he has never swabbed and neither have his family members in quarantine. «At the end of March, while I was locked up in the shop, my wife calls me and tells me that the father can no longer breathe. He had saturation at 60. “But at 60 he dies”, they tell me in the hospital, “why didn’t you bring him earlier?”. And in the end he didn’t make it.’ In those months Nembro was a bubble of despair. “Clients came in and made a list of deceased relatives. There was solidarity but also a lot of fear, we wondered when it would be our turn. Then we were told that everything had been done right.