Milan, Italy Italy discovered its first COVID-19 infections a year ago. The outbreak led to the first nationwide exclusion outside China, claiming more than 95,000 lives across the country. But as CBS News correspondent Chris Livesay reports, it’s a very different story now.
Life slowly returned to normal, and Italians filled the streets over the weekend – even in the north of the country, which was once the center of its coronavirus epidemic.
Beatrice is just one year old, and what a year it was not. Two weeks after she was born, her mother noticed fever.
“It used to be that when my kids coughed, we weren’t crazy right away,” mother Marta Zaninoni told CBS News. “But now in our family, coughing is no longer just a cough. It’s really stressful.”
Beatrice had COVID-19 – the first known case in Europe in a newborn.
“They immediately put her in an incubator,” Zaninoni said. “I could not even say goodbye.”
While her small body fought the disease in isolation, Beatrice became a symbol of hope for her family’s badly affected region of Bergamo.
Many people followed her progress in the hospital, and the whole country would soon join Beatrice in isolation. Infections skyrocketed and plunged towns, cities and then all of Italy into what was unthinkable for a free society: lock up.
The death toll has risen, and as military service members have been forced to turn into pets and barns into a temporary morgue, it has robbed not only people’s lives but also their dignity.
Italy’s iconic city streets were without people. Pope Francis even rendered virtually an unprecedented solitary Easter service. In small towns like Nembro, which once had the highest death rate in the country, Catholic Mass was held in front of empty church pews for most of 2020.
But today, from Milan to Rome, life has returned. Sunday the church of Nembro was full.
“Last year we had 188 funerals,” Nembro priest Don Matteo Cella told Livesay. “People are planning weddings this year.”
Old traditions reflect on Italy, but with some differences. A year ago, something as simple as drinking a cappuccino became publicly unthinkable.
Life is hardly normal again; the law still requires you to wear a mask in public at all times, even outside, except when eating or drinking.
It’s a slow recovery and not without casualties – something Beatrice’s mother knows firsthand as a COVID survivor. The virus killed her uncle and grandfather while Beatrice was still in the hospital.
“They never met Beatrice,” Zaninoni lamented, adding that the illness had brought the rest of the family closer together than ever before.
“Finally, after 40 days, Beatrice became COVID-free on Easter day,” the mother recalls. “It was a real resurrection for us. Despite all the deaths in Italy, Beatrice brought us life.”
A year later, Italians are eagerly awaiting vaccination of doses.
The rollout throughout the European Union was slower than in the US. Many Italians in their 80s still do not know when they will get their first chance – a special case in a country with one of the oldest populations in the world.