Forever Unprepared

The Lancet editorial of 2003, “Aftermath of an outbreak” – following the SARS crisis, and recently quoted by Doctor M. Galli, Director of infectious diseases at Sacco Hospital during an interview – stated that: “Until now, plagues were something from our past, from a time before antibiotics and vaccines. SARS quickly whipped our normal routines and patterns of health-care delivery into a frenzy. It caught us off guard, unsuspecting, unprepared. We scrambled desperately to contain its spread, to match it move for move. In the beginning we were overwhelmed by the numbers falling ill, by the severity of their clinical presentation, and we were disadvantaged by our lack of firm information about the virus. Workers who staffed our emergency rooms and intensive-care units fell suddenly ill, they needed care, and were no longer able to give it. If SARS returns—and I believe it will—we must become accustomed to seeing our colleagues in hospital, on respirators, alongside their patients.”

At the end of February 2020 Codogno - a few thousand inhabitants in the province of Piacenza - was isolated from the rest of the country as the first red zone in Italy.

In the following two months, only the bulletins of the Civil Protection and the live streaming of Giuseppe Conte broke the silence and the immobility of the lockdown: the constant increase of contagions and deaths echoed in the houses of Italians, leaving people astonished in front of the invisible virus that seemed impossible to fight. The already codified iconography of that period found its most painful and dramatic expression in the procession of Army trucks from the cemetery of Bergamo. The political debate regarding the extent and responsibility of the event and of such a fierce emergency in some regions and provinces was already particularly heated, leaving little room to mourn the individual victims on the long list of the names.

The rituals of mourning, distorted and banished during the lockdown, left many families unable to successfully close a chapter of an extremely traumatic experience.

I documented the immediate aftermath of the most tragic moment of crisis in recent history, observing how individuals in Italy processed a distorted and intangible mourning in the face of the fragility and precariousness of a system that had to cope with the ongoing health emergency around the world.