“A generation has died”: Italy passes China in coronavirus deaths
Wednesday, March 18, was the most difficult day in a series of difficult days that began less than a month ago. It was the day Italians saw a long line of army trucks leave the cemetery of the northern town of Bergamo laden with the corpses of coronavirus victims.
(CBS) – The city’s only crematorium — which has been active 24 hours per day, seven days a week for the last week — could no longer accommodate the dead, who were now being taken, in a somber procession, to crematoriums in nearby towns. Antonio Ricciardi, the head of Bergamo’s largest funeral company, said he’s carried out almost 600 burials or cremations since March 1.
“In a normal month, we would do about 120,” he said. “A generation has died in just over two weeks. We’ve never seen anything like this, and it just makes you cry.”
March 18 was also the day that Italy announced a record number of deaths in a single day — 475 — a record not just in Italy but anywhere in the world since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The following day, Thursday, Italy’s death toll surpassed China’s.
Yet it was only February 21 when Italy announced its first “real” coronavirus case, a 38-year-old man in the Lombardy town of Codogno. Rome had already seen three cases — two Chinese tourists from Wuhan and an Italian researcher repatriated from the same city — but this was its first independent case with no known connections to China or other infections.
To this day, “patient zero,” whoever infected the 38-year-old, has never been found. The Codogno patient — athletic, in excellent health — remains in the hospital after weeks in intensive care and on artificial respiration.
Italy’s response to the breakout was to lock down the north’s 16 million people on March 8; the next day, a national lockdown was announced. On March 11, the government announced restrictions to almost all commercial activities with the exceptions of supermarkets and pharmacies.
But the disease marched on. By March 18, the numbers were staggering: 35,713 infections, 2,978 deaths and 10% of those infected in intensive care. On Thursday, authorities reported 415 new deaths, bringing the death toll to 3,405, and the national lockdown was extended indefinitely.
