(By John Blackeye)This is not an exercise, this is not an exercise! ". How many times in American films have we heard this phrase shouted from a megaphone placed inside a military base or on an aircraft carrier, to indicate to everyone that that imminent danger was not the result of an exercise but was a dramatic reality from which it was necessary take cover.
Here, if it were possible to send a message to all our government officials, it would be appropriate to tell them that "this is not an exercise! ".
Yet despite it hundreds of coffins are loaded every day on military trucks to be taken elsewhere to disengage the areas of infection, despite every day, more than forty days after the beginning of the crucial phase of the epidemic, hundreds of Italian families are visited by the specter of death that takes away someone while trying to keep the enemy away by locking himself in the house, well still today someone has not understood well what is the real national scenario that is facing the Italian people.
One has the impression that some government representatives, without educational qualifications and technical preparation but placed on the institutional seats according to a palace logic that must distribute the posts of power on the basis of the size of a political party, have not yet understood probably what the scale of the problem is.
Someone should yell at them that this isn't an exercise and somebody else should let them know that the election campaign ended a few years ago.
The management of the emergency by some or perhaps all the institutional government figures committed to bringing Italy out of this deadly epidemic, is carried out by reassuring the people as is done in the election campaigns, where a sentence called good and a reassurance launched on television, they can entice a voter to choose one politician over another.
But here we are not in the election campaign, around us death is reaping victims without sparing any region of Italy. This is a national emergency. So, if the Italian people are told that millions of masks are coming, it is not possible that after more than forty days the words have not turned into facts.
We have an absolute need for masks. It is not possible that three months after the start of the infection, and forty days after the precipice of the situation, the masks are still not found.
The whole emergency is developing with a single common factor throughout the Italian territory. There is an extreme need for masks and not only for health workers who should have full warehouses but also for ordinary people who go around the supermarkets with scarves wrapped on their faces having to put a good face on a bad game.
For months we tried to convince the Italians that masks were not needed, even though he knew that the reality was another and that a large part of the population moved with trains, buses and subways in close contact with each other.
Then when the truth - which affirms itself - revealed all the opposite, namely that the masks were necessary, indeed, indispensable, a cumbersome and complex system was set in motion, mixed with bureaucracy and state surveillance which started the purchase of masks from abroad that still have not been seen in the pharmacies of our cities.
Virologists say that we have reached stability at the peak of the contagions and that from now on a drop in numbers should begin to occur. Yet, three months after the manifestation of the first cases in Italy and forty days after the outbreak of the health war, there are no masks on the whole national territory even to pay them gold. All pharmacies display a melancholy sign that is now eroded by bad weather and rain and which always reads like this: "The masks are gone ".
The same pharmacists and health workers carry the signs of the masks on their faces, always the same ones, which are forced to sanitize in the evening, with more or less orthodox methods, to be able to wear it the next day after washing them, perhaps, in a basin .
Still, the mask is the only medical device that if it had been used by all Italians since the beginning, would have certainly spared infections, hospitalizations and deaths.
But what is stunned is that the management of the emergency by government officials takes place as if it were in the middle of the election campaign. The Prime Minister appears periodically on television to read long pages of a press release announcing measures that will be taken shortly and which, however, the Governors of the regions most affected, would have liked to have been taken weeks earlier.
The Foreign Minister showed up on March 19, announcing the arrival of millions of masks. The same announcement was made on March 22nd, then on the 26th and finally a few hours ago. Too bad that many Italians full of trust went to the pharmacy today too, finding the usual melancholic message written on a sheet now yellowed by time and pasted on the entrance doors, with which it is reported that the masks have been out of time.
I think someone at the end of an emergency will do, let's say the point of the situation. A sort of final balance. And if it was possible to investigate a Minister legitimately voted by the people for keeping a group of illegal immigrants out of Italian waters for a few days on a ship, one wonders what could happen to a government team that, after three months since the start of the pandemic and forty days after the bloody fight against the virus, it has not been able to provide banal masks to all the Italian people.
Win this battle with the disease, return to your activities and start breathing the open air of which, only now, we have begun to appreciate its real value but then, please, who is responsible for so many malfunctions, do a step back. If we haven't had people trained in pandemic management, we would like to have people prepared to manage the recovery of social life. But here it takes courage. Not that of the Italians who have shown it so far but that of the politicians who should step aside.