Tackling the epidemic

My good friend Fabio is Milanese. As a native of the great city of Rome, I tend to think of Milan as South Austrian. You know, things happen on time, the streets are clean, and where there is bustle there is also a sense of purpose. None of these charges can be levelled against Rome.

Rome to me is the essence of Italy. Milan is northern Europe.

Still, I suppose technically Fabio is, nonetheless, Italian. And as a resident of the region of Lombardy, he was already subject to the coronavirus lockdown even before the Italian government extended it to the entire country. The “situation,” he wrote to me, “is surreal. Unimaginable.”

Top left: deserted arcade in Milan. Bottom left: Fallas crowd in Valencia
Right: two women fighting over toilet rolls in an Australian supermarket

Certainly, if Milan maintains its sense of purpose – as I’m sure it does – the bustle is gone. Places usually thonged by crowds of both locals and tourists are now deserted. The atmosphere must be eerie, to say the least.

Most recently, Fabio has gone still further, calling for the deployment of the army. Why? People have been breaking curfew rules, kids have been getting together out of doors to have drunken parties, the lockdown isn’t being respected.

I have to say that this doesn’t entirely surprise me, and it may strengthen the sense that the Milanese are, after all, truly Italians. One of my college lecturers was Catholic and she told me of a conversation she once had with an Italian bishop.

“Why,” she asked him, “does the Pope issue instructions that are so strict it’s almost impossible for English Catholics to follow them?”

“Ah,” he replied, “The Pope is Italian.”

This was the time before we started to get Popes from other parts of the world.

“The problem with England,” the bishop went on, “is that its culture is Puritan. This even affects the Catholic community. They try to follow Papal instructions to the letter. But the Pope’s Italian, and he knows Italians will ignore 90% of what he says. So he deliberately makes his decrees particularly strict. I can see how this makes for problems in England.”

As with spiritual instructions, so it seems with government ones: total compliance isn’t the first reaction of all Italians.

Still, it seems Fabio’s plea didn’t fall on deaf ears. He tells me the army is indeed being deployed. Maybe, with bad grace, and under the baleful stare of men with guns, more Italians will now begin to take the lockdown seriously.

Meanwhile, where we’re living, near Valencia in Spain, we’re in the runup to the great fiesta of the Fallas. Celebrations are already under way, with thousands of people thronging the streets. Rather like the marches for International Women’s Day at the weekend. It’s hard not to admire such a tenacious attachment to traditions, particularly to joyous ones. On the other hand, we’re now up to 1600 infections across the country, 10% of the total in Europe. That’s still far behind Italy, with over 9000, but we’re catching up…

Some are beginning to question just how responsible our devil-may-care attitude may be.

Interestingly, it was announced only today that the Fallas would, even at this late stage, be cancelled. Or at least postponed. I haven’t asked Fabio, but I suspect I know what his reaction would be… For my own part, I wasn’t going to be going to any of the major events.

It strikes me that we need to take the epidemic seriously. Which isn’t the same as panicking about it. The women fighting over toilet rolls in an Australian supermarket strikes me as at best an over-reaction. At worst, it’s a reversion to the worst instincts of man.

But claiming that nothing much is happening, as Donald Trump has? Or not cancelling major public events? Or simply not keeping contact between people to the minimum absolutely necessary? That doesn’t strike me as healthy either.

The Italian government’s action may, as Fabio says, create a surreal atmosphere. But I really can’t see how else you limit the spread of a virus.

The saddest aspect of all this? It’s the lack of an internationally coordinated response. In a time of nationalism, individual countries seem to have decided that they must simply do their own thing.

That’s a pity. Although I was encouraged to see a suggestion that the virus itself might provide a solution to the problem. Will Hutton, in the Observer, the sister paper of the British Guardian, argued that the infection might drive us to improve what globalisation means.

Meanwhile, Fabio, hang on in there! This won’t go on for ever. And, unimaginable though the short term results are, the actions of the Italian government may well turn out to be the most effective response to the problem.

I certainly hope so.