Coronavirus: The Second Wave In Italy.

Politics, grappling with the 'health or economic crisis' dilemma, has failed to provide the country with the necessary preparation to deal with this return to a highly dramatic situation in a fair manner. Since September, the trend of infections has been constantly increasing and politics has constantly fluctuated between the demands of the technical and scientific committees and the protests from those who are aware that the economic crisis resulting from new forced closures can be devastating.

An attempt was initially made to deal with the situation with "soft" solutions, which did not give the desired result. Then we went on to force the population to give up some individual freedoms, which were not too important, in the hope that it would be enough. The news that comes daily from the regions and especially from hospitals, puts us in front of a situation that is very similar, and in some cases even worse, than the one we experienced in the spring. The Emergency Rooms in the midst of a crisis of personnel and places; lack of doctors and nurses; departments dismembered and transformed almost exclusively to the care of Covid patients.

This situation is sometimes untenable and particularly complex in the southern regions where, in past years, health has often been forgotten by local and central administrators. The causes: certainly many and to be divided equally between the population and the rulers. The first, forgetting recommendations and how the virus hit the whole world hard and sneakily, causing deaths everywhere, thought well, in the summer, to definitively consider the danger to have disappeared and return to live exactly as before the pandemic. Politicians, obsessed with polls, local elections, lobbies pushing one way or the other, have shown the little in number of interventions they have managed to produce.

In May, when the first phase of the pandemic, certainly thanks also to the rise in temperatures, ended, we listened dozens of times to the recommendations of those who said that in September Covid-19 would return, perhaps even more aggressively. So what? Politics was well aware of the critical issues to be faced in order to avoid a new tragedy: transport and health care in the first place. What has been done? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The majority in government continued to push for costly and almost always useless interventions (holiday bonuses and scooter bonuses in the first place), to preach distancing, the prohibition of numerous aggregations and the use of masks, only to then show extreme lassism and often not putting into practice even what they said. The opposition. In Italy, oppositions matter very little: the quarrelsome climate that our policy offers does not allow, as is the case in other countries, to resort to programmatic tables to be shared with the opposition in emergency cases.

The opposition therefore does their "work": they always say "no" to everything that the majority decides; just as the majority always says 'no' to whatever proposal comes from the other side. Who's going to lose out? Of course the citizens. So what? Renewal of the "Emergency Situation" that allows immediate operations without resorting to parliamentary voting. This decision was rather opposed by the opposition. But the majority managed to get it approved not without some negative opinions within it.

A few days ago the umpteenth "DPCM" of President Conte, with which there were time limits to the opening of many activities considered "non-essential" such as catering, and the closure of other activities such as gyms, beauty centers etc. The protest, especially from the operators of the catering sector (bars, restaurants, etc.) immediately ignited. In some major cities, Naples, Milan and Turin in particular, protests have often degenerated into real clashes with law enforcement and vandalism that had little to do with the workers' rightful demands. Very often, common criminals and extremist political fringes have been added to the latter, resulting in particularly serious urban guerrilla warfare.

Meanwhile, the epidemiological situation continued to deteriorate, leading the Scientific Technical Committee to an increasingly pressing invitation to a complete lockdown for a few weeks. The economy, thinking about the possibility that the Christmas period, the most positive ever for consumption, can live in a lockdown even just soft, has begun to reckon; the resulting crisis would be such as to force a very large proportion of traders to close their businesses permanently.

The Council’s President, therefore, pushed on the one hand by economists and on the other by health professionals, has decided to take a decision that is at least original, but dictated by the awareness that not all Italian regions have the same characteristics of spread of contagion and above all of the ability to cope with the health emergency with adequate structures. The idea was to divide Italy into 4 risk zones: green: no danger; yellow: non-serious danger; orange: intermediate contagion level; red: highly dangerous situation. No region has been included in the green zone while most have ended up in the "yellow" situation but with particular attention to some that have a complex evolution of the situation.

Two regions have been colored orange: Puglia and Sicily. Those with the most difficult situation, Piedmont, Valle D'Aosta, Lombardy and Calabria, ended up in the hell of the red zone. The difference in measures taken for the various coloured bands is considerable, but some have been imposed on all regions without distinction. The most important are the curfew from 10 pm to 5 am, the closure of bars and restaurants at 6 pm and remote teaching for high schools. For orange areas, among other things, the ban on crossing regional borders and the closure of bars and restaurants are imposed. The red zones, on the other hand, are in a lockdown situation only slightly more tenuous than the one that forced Italy to "stop" in the spring.

The provisions issued by the DPCM may be subject to restrictive review at any time but, after 15 days of their enactment and after examination of the results obtained, it will also be possible to move into less rigid bands for those regions that will have a markedly improved epidemiological situation. Yesterday, the Ministry of Health issued a new ordinance, resulting from the worsening situation in some "yellow" areas: Abruzzo, Umbria, Basilicata, Liguria and Tuscany pass in the "orange" zone. Particular attention for Campania, where a strong institutional clash between the Region, mayors and central government, is causing widespread misgivings, especially in view of the explosive health situation of campanian hospitals.

Taking into account the risk factors and especially the existing medical facilities, the region, according to many, should be immediately included in the red zone but the protests of the population and especially of the workers, will not make this decision easy. It is news today that Tuscany and Campania have passed to the red zone! The government is trying, using all possible aid from Europe, to meet the needs of those in economic crisis due to the pandemic: grants, blocking redundancies, suspension of taxes, redundancy fund, are just some of them.

By continuing to monitor the situation of the epidemic on a daily basis and to make the appropriate changes to the restrictions imposed, the government is trying to bring the situation to normalization and decreased risks in order to allow the population a Christmas if not "normal" at least a little less harsh than might be feared. All this, of course, waiting for the vaccine to arrive. But do people welcome these restrictions? How do 'deniers' present themselves with rules contrary to their absurd ideas? And above all: will the State, with the police, be able to enforce the rules by all? In the next few days we will be examining some regions of the three bands to see how the situation will develop.