![]() ![]() “The virus has always travelled faster than politics and bureaucracy,” Cartabellotta told Al Jazeera.Īl Jazeera spoke to four people whose lives were overturned by the events of the last year: Doctors of pension age were not replaced, resulting in a shortage of specialists such as anaesthesiologists, and weak local care networks that led to hospitals becoming overwhelmed. “By the time it came to face the pandemic, the national health system had been severely weakened by a decade of funding cuts,” said Nino Cartabellotta, a leading Italian public health expert, professor and president of Gruppo Italiano per la Medicina Basata sulle Evidenze (GIMBE – Italy’s Group for Evidence-based Medicine).īetween 20, Italy’s public health sector faced cuts and lost revenue amounting to 37 billion euros ($45bn). ![]() Inequality and poverty are rising as the economy, which had never fully recovered from a 2008 crisis, weakens. The lives Europeans had taken for granted in peacetime changed almost overnight: Access to healthcare, free movement and seeing friends and family were no longer a given.Ī year later, more than 88,000 people have died after contracting the virus in Italy, the second-highest death toll in Europe after the United Kingdom. It took another 20 days for Italy to announce a blanket lockdown, on March 9, closing all commercial activities and confining citizens to their homes. The virus had long spread outside the city of Wuhan, China, which had been under a strict lockdown for more than a month. The team at the small hospital soon realised this was not an isolated case. On February 21, 2020, Italy’s “patient one” tested positive for COVID-19 at a hospital in Codogno, a town in Lombardy – and that was the day the lives of millions of people across the world changed beyond imagination. ![]()
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