ROME. Stories of men. People who died in Bergamo in the darkest moment. When the Covid-19 pandemic still seemed distant and was relegated to a Chinese “fact”. Cassandra Locati, a teacher in a primary school in Bergamo, lost her father Vincenzo, 78, in March last year, within five days. Paolo Casiraghi, from Osio Sotto, employed in a multinational company, within a month (March-April 2020) saw Covid take away his in-laws and then his 81-year-old father Gabriele. These episodes and those of 500 other people are recounted in the summons which is now being examined by the civil court of Rome to which the lawyers Consuelo Locati, Alessandro Pedone, Piero Pasini, Giovanni Benedetto and Luca Berni have turned to ask for the condemnation of the Prime Minister, the Ministry of Health and the Lombardy Region to compensation for non-pecuniary damage suffered amounting to approximately 100 million euros.
At the center of the dispute is the management of the health crisis by the institutions in the face of the “absolute non-existence of a pandemic plan”, which should have been written according to a decision of the European Parliament in 2013 and in compliance with the guidelines of the World Organization of Health (WHO) and the European Center for the Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases (Ecdc).
“From the judiciary we expect answers that politics has never given us – explains Cassandra Locati, sister of the lawyer Consuelo -. We want to understand why our loved ones died within a few days and if anything could be done to save them. We are sure that, at least in the initial phase of the pandemic, doctors had to make choices, thinking about saving the youngest people and sacrificing the most fragile ones. They were put in a position to make these choices and I guess it was tough for them too. But someone has to tell us why this all happened. «The prosecutor of Bergamo is on track, is working well – continues Locati, also among the members of the“ We denounce ”Committee – but we ask the civil court of Rome to remove that silence and that silence that we have encountered at a political level. The Lombardy Region, for example, has done everything to hinder our lawyers, we feel abandoned. We know that the way to go to get justice is very long and full of difficulties but if we are here it is because we owe it to our loved ones that we have lost ».
Paolo Casiraghi is also of the same tenor: «Who should have protected us, from the beginning, has never done so. When we went in search of face masks, safety devices and oxygen cylinders, we did nothing but run around in circles. Our family members were taken away in a litter and we did not know that we would never see them again and that their funeral would be celebrated through a mobile phone. Politics has given us only chatter. We asked for meetings and we were never received, we wanted to be listened to at least and we didn’t get that either. We were immediately pushed aside ».