In chilling coronavirus warning, Italian journalist urges US to lockdown NOW: 'Don't do what we did'
An Italian journalist is urging the US and UK to take the decisive move to lockdown their countries amid the COVID-19 pandemic to control the burgeoning crisis.
The plea comes as over 21,000 patients were confirmed to have the novel coronavirus in Italy. The figure stands at over 2900 in the US and over 1100 in the UK, and increasing everyday.
Mattia Ferraresi, who writes for Italian newspaper Il Foglio said that his country's government wasted time by not putting the country under lockdown much earlier.
Writing for the Boston Globe, he said, "'As in any war, we have to choose who to treat and who not'. That was a headline on March 9 in Il Corriere della Sera, a leading newspaper in Italy, that informed us that hospitals in Italy’s north, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in our country, were being stretched thin and the health care system was on the brink of collapse."
After writing in detail how the outbreak has broken down the healthcare system in Italy with doctors having to make decisions as if they were in a war, the journalist said, "So here’s my warning for the United States: It didn’t have to come to this." He then added, "We, of course, couldn’t stop the emergence of a previously unknown and deadly virus. But we could have mitigated the situation we are now in, in which people who could have been saved are dying. I, and too many others, could have taken a simple yet morally loaded action: We could have stayed home."
He also added, "Italy has now been in lockdown since March 9; it took weeks after the virus first appeared here to realize that severe measures were absolutely necessary," and added, "According to several data scientists, Italy is about 10 days ahead of Spain, Germany, and France in the epidemic progression, and 13 to 16 days ahead of the United Kingdom and the United States. That means those countries have the opportunity to take measures that today may look excessive and disproportionate, yet from the future, where I am now, are perfectly rational in order to avoid a health care system collapse."
He also explained, "The United States has some 45,000 ICU beds, and even in a moderate outbreak scenario, some 200,000 Americans will need intensive care. Before the outbreak hit my country, I thought I was acting rationally because I screened and processed a lot of information about the epidemic. But my being well-informed didn’t make me any more rational. I lacked what you might call “moral knowledge” of the problem. I knew about the virus, but the issue was not affecting me in a significant, personal way. It took the terrible ethical dilemma that doctors face in Lombardy to wake me up."
He urged, "The way to avoid or mitigate all this in the United States and elsewhere is to do something similar to what Italy, Denmark, and Finland are doing now, but without wasting the few, messy weeks in which we thought a few local lockdowns, canceling public gatherings, and warmly encouraging working from home would be enough to stop the spread of the virus. We now know that wasn’t nearly enough."