Editor’s note: the editorial staff of RTBF has chosen to broadcast this report because it shows the reality that goes through Bergamo, a city in northern Italy during the coronavirus pandemic. Warning, These images can therefore, in their entirety or through certain passages, offend your sensitivity.
Hearses lined up in front of the gates of the cemetery of Bergamo, funeral staff wearing masks and the cemetery church overflowing with coffins, symbolic images of this epidemic which has hit this small town in Lombardy hard. Bergamo is the city that the Belgians know to be one of the destinations that links Charleroi to northern Italy, the area most contaminated by the new coronavirus. In this province, 400 people have died in the past 24 hours.
Buried at home, the 120,000 residents are afraid, and everyone knows at least one person taken by the Covid-19 in recent days. No one understands why such high mortality (nearly 9% of patients have died to date) in an area where the health system is known for its quality. “This cannot be explained, it is God’s punishment, throws a passerby. God is angry with us because of everything that is going on in the world …“
Three months in prison
Since March 8, like all of Italy, the city of Bergamo has been confined. The police control pedestrians and vehicles to enforce the measures of the emergency decree decided by the government: authorized exits to work, health reasons and urgent need. The penalty can go up to three months in prison for those who do not respect the rule. “This document is for your wife, she too must complete the document to say where she was born and give the justification which explains why she leaves home.“A masked policeman explains to a passerby. According to the police, offenses are rather rare, but controls are stricter given the crisis situation in the city.”It’s not always clear, we have to understand if they’re telling us the truth or if they’re trying to get out of their way“, deplores a carabinieri.
We make only one transport, from the place of death to the cemetery and basta!
The mayor of Bergamo must organize everything to save the living but also take care of resting the dead. “We had to open the church in the cemetery and the mortuary room, to put the coffins and bodies of the people who were too many in the hospital morgues, relates Giorgio Gori. Because the number is really huge and the death toll is probably even higher than the official figure. “An employee of the funeral directors has also made public these terrible images of dozens of coffins deposited in the temple of all the Saints.”We know that many people are dying, often elderly people who die in nursing homes or their homes, without anyone coming to test them and officially say they are carriers, but obviously , the symptoms are always these“, regrets the mayor.
In the monumental cemetery of Bergamo, hearses line up in front of the gates. In recent days, cemetery workers have buried a coffin every 30 minutes. And it is the funeral directors who take care of the formalities, the families are kept away. “They cannot be present, the regulations of the Lombardy region prohibit the presence of parents at the funeral, says Gianluca Parente, an undertaker in Bergamo. We make only one transport, from the place of death to the cemetery and basta!“The deceased are therefore not entitled to a funeral mass, except for a funeral on the sly and without a priest.”We can’t do anything, they don’t let us do anything!“complains a family member of a deceased.
Only families who are not sick or quarantined move to bring some flowers. “There are an enormous number of deaths in the houses, because the ambulances no longer manage to take all the sick to the hospitals and therefore they die at home, Claudia Scotti, an undertaker. It becomes very complicated for us because we have to go and find a body that is positive for Coronavirus in an apartment, where the premises are therefore contaminated and we have to enter with protections. If they are Covid-19 dead, we do not dress them, we take them as they are and we put them in the coffin, nothing else!“
Overwhelmed by these dead, the city also called the army for help, a resort to great resources as in wartime. So on Wednesday evening, a military convoy took 65 coffins to transport them to other cities in northern Italy where the bodies will be cremated. Because the crematorium in Bergamo is no longer enough. Filmed by a resident, the convoy, discreetly departed out of respect for the dead, shows the extent of the tragedy. But since then, the operation of transporting the bodies has been daily.
The “ghosts”, feared heroes
At St. John XXIII hospital in Bergamo, the rate of ambulances increases every day. Dressed in their protective outfits (the inhabitants call them “ghosts”), the hero nurses are sometimes unfortunately predictors of the dead. In Bergamo, no one wants to see them arrive. Brand new, the hospital has 1,000 beds, 500 of which are occupied by Covid 19 patients. On the façade, a huge drawing thanks the nursing staff. “It’s really a beautiful drawing, it means a lot, it means everything right now, because in the end we are in their hands“exclaims a lady in front of the hospital.
Since all the health management is positive at Covid19, the hospital refuses entry to journalists. 30% of nursing staff are affected, some are in intensive care, some have died. According to Doctor Lorenzo Dantiga, the hospital will not keep up at this rate: “Fortunately, so far, we haven’t really had to choose between patients and leave those who normally would have been resuscitated unattended. But it will happen, if patients continue to increase, choice becomes inevitable“.
At the hospital, the resuscitation service is overwhelmed, the oxygen tanks are empty, an external system had to be installed urgently. The medical profession cannot explain this high mortality. “They die a lot for two reasons, firstly because there is a crowding in the hospitals, there are too many requests. The second reason is that because the hospital is a source of contagion, many decide to stay at home, and when the time comes for them to go to the hospital, the disease is already too advanced“says Professor Remuzzi of the Mario Negri study center.
The home in a neighboring town?
In Bergamo, everyone points to the neighboring valley. Alzano Lombardo and Nembro, two municipalities of 13,000 inhabitants, headquarters of many industries, make the wealth of the whole region (hundreds of companies are related to China). This place has the highest contagion rate in Italy. The the outbreak was born last January: a case of severe pneumonia at Alzano Lombardo hospital, but no one has thought of the Coronavirus.
Everyone who passed through this hospital was infected. This is the case of Roberto Bonassi’s family: his uncle and his cousin both died. “They went to the emergency department for a common ankle sprain and they were both infectedsays Roberto. They were taken away and no one saw them again, they died alone, without the comfort of a caress or a loved one at their bedside“.
72 other people died in Alzano in three weeks. Mayor Camillo Bertocchi still does not understand why the government did not impose total containment in his municipality already at the end of February, as was the case in Codogno, the other focal point of the epidemic in Lombardy. “The Higher Institute of Health had put our area under surveillance and on the basis of the opinion expressed by scientists, the government made its decision. There were four days of beat, where we awaited the decision of the government. We were ready to accept all decisions, even total confinement, but because of these four days of doubt, the situation quickly became unmanageable.“.
The mobilized Church
The neighboring village also mourns over a hundred dead in twelve days. When an ambulance is parked in the street, everyone wonders who will be next. Many are now afraid of being taken to hospital, presumably out of fear of dying alone. Because the dead go alone to the cemetery, but the epidemic of Coronavirus also prevents any comfort at the end of life. According to the priest of the Basilica, some confreres are still at the bedside for the sick.
“We are here, even if we have to overcome our human fear of contagionreassures Don Filippo Tomaselli. We have decided to respond as a church. It is important to say that we are present and we are trying to do everything so that no one, I repeat no one, dies without a sign of the cross, a little holy water, without the warmth of a prayer. One of my colleagues here in the parish has also chosen to live all the time, day and night, in the hospital since the epidemic began“. The priest was filmed this week by an Italian television crew at the Treviglio hospital near Bergamo. On Friday, he was quarantined, also contaminated. In Bergamo, thirteen priests have died since the start of the epidemic.
This Lombardy province is still the most contaminated in Italy today. Every day the number of Covid-19 positive cases increases from 5 to 600 people, to exceed 6000 patients. At 6 p.m., when everywhere in the country, Italians from other cities come out on their balconies to sing and encourage each other saying that everything will be fine, fear is tangible in Bergamo and the balconies remain empty.
Find this exclusive report by Valérie Dupont in the special edition after the news at 7:30 p.m.
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