A Saturday morning like many others, with the sun shining and people walking down the street. The pandemic enters Roberta Balducci’s life like this. A poet would have said that in fact the world ends “not with a crash, but with a lament” and that late February morning the only out of tune note in an otherwise ordinary day is the tiredness of Nino Balducci, Roberta’s father. They walk together when he begins to complain of the first symptoms, weakness, a cough, a cold that makes its way into his body: neither of them suspects anything. Roberta thinks it’s all due to the tiredness caused by a long week of work: she takes her father home, puts him to bed, wipes his nose lovingly and takes turns with her sisters to keep him company. So until Monday morning, when the man’s conditions deteriorate and he has to be taken to the emergency room. It’s February 24, 2020, Nino doesn’t know it yet but he’s the first Como area infected with Covid.
«It was also tough because my father was elderly, diabetic, hypertensive and had undergone surgery for melanoma: in short, according to what was said on television, he was the perfect candidate for death from Covid – says Roberta, three years after the start of the nightmare -. We were scared. However, I believe that being the first infected in the province was my dad’s great fortune because they dedicated so much attention to him, they hospitalized him and kept him under control all the time… after him they never hospitalized anyone, not even mine Husband”.