(by John Blackeye) Until a few months ago, we put the deaths of Saturday night on the front page. Lives destroyed by many young boys because of nightlife, alcohol, drugs. Lives that often stopped on a highway at full speed.
We often turned our hearts on Sunday morning to those news that we never wanted to hear. Many lives, sometimes even dozens in one weekend, saddened the whole nation pushing government officials to seek control and prevention solutions with which to reduce or eliminate the problem.
In this period of national, indeed global, tragedy, we don't expect the weekend to count the dead, but we count them every day and there are many hundreds. Today's bulletin reports another six hundred which, unfortunately, industry experts and journalists, manage to embed in a downward trend of the pandemic, treating people, stories and families as positive numbers of the contagion that seems not to be growing as before.
In the total indifference and cynicism of a media system, the gaze of millions of Italians is shifted to that stabilized trend of the pandemic, suggesting that we are almost out of the tunnel even if our hospitals continue to count six hundred deaths every day.
Yet, among the opinions of virologists, who nevertheless maintain great caution, and the shameless resourcefulness of many politicians, the message is being sent that the time has come to reset the counter and start a new life with the beginning of the phase. two.
The madness of an economic and financial system that wants to manage the life of a nation by arrogating its role as the driving force of the country, would like to ignore hundreds of deaths a day to restart with a cursed phase 2 that science and the situation of contingent gravity should not really call in question.
The engine of the nation is not companies and the economy. The engine of the nation is men. And if we are facing something never seen before, if the whole of humanity has been brought to its knees by a virus that does not look at anyone and if Italy itself has been among the nations most affected by invisible evil, then we must stop a moment and we must understand that in the face of a cataclysm of this magnitude, men and women in suits, sitting behind a computer to make profits and profits, cannot pull government representatives by the jacket, ignore the death of six hundred people a day and throw the country into a phase two that would have catastrophic consequences.
The situation is very serious. Even today there are almost four thousand infections and the efforts of the Head of Civil Protection are worthless. In reporting the situation during the usual evening conference, he begins to rattle off those dramatic data starting from the small positive elements of information that arrive from hospitals where there are fewer hospitalizations. . Leaving the immense number of deceased last is of no use. The situation is there for all to see.
The reality is that the pandemic is underway and we are in the middle of the problem. Neither before nor after, we are right in the middle. The stabilization of the horizontal line in a graph that has perhaps touched the peak of the contagions cannot mean that the problem is being reabsorbed. The stabilization of the line means that with enormous efforts put in place by sixty million Italians, we have only managed to weaken the devastating action of the virus. Weaken and don't stop.
Any opening, any widening of the controls, contacts, relationships, as well as the reopening of the factories and production, would only lead to the peak being raised to a lethality level, certainly higher than the one just passed, with a spread of new outbreaks, infections and deaths.
We have nothing under control. We don't know who the positives are. We don't know who the healed are and we don't know who the healthy carriers are. Among these are those who have never been infected and who, putting the whole population back into circulation, would risk getting sick and bringing the nation to its knees within a few weeks.
Let them come into the open, put their faces on them, instead of pulling the government politicians by the jacket. Let those who want to return to normal appear in the face despite the six hundred deaths a day that no longer even deserve the honors of the news. Italians need to know who has more interest in earnings than in human lives.
Phase two can begin when Italy has been made safe, with all due respect to those who manage to ignore tens of thousands of men and women who, in a a couple of months have left unbridgeable gaps in Italian families.