CODOGNO, Italy (AP) – With wreath-laying, tree-planting and church services, Italians were on Sunday one year since their country experienced the first known COVID-19 death.
Villages in northern Italy were the first to be hit hard by the pandemic and locked up, and residents paid tribute to the dead. Italy, with about 95,500 confirmed viral deaths, has Europe’s second highest pandemic after Britain. Experts believe the virus has also killed many others who have never been tested.
While the first wave of infections has largely engulfed Lombardy and other northern regions, a second surge that began in the fall of 2020 has swept across the country. The number of new coronavirus infections has remained stubbornly high despite a large number of restrictions on travel between regions, and in some cases between towns. In addition, gyms, theaters and theaters are closed and restaurants and bars must be closed early in the evening. There is a nationwide evening clock from 22:00 to 05:00.
So far, Italy has confirmed 2.8 million cases.
It was at the hospital in the city of Codogno in Lombardy, where a doctor recognized what would happen in medical history as the first known COVID-19 case in the West in a patient without ties to the outbreak in Asia, where initially developed coronavirus infections. . The diagnosis was made on the evening of February 20, 2020 in a 38-year-old, otherwise healthy, athletic man.
Next to the Red Cross office in Codogno on Sunday, the governor of Lombardy and the mayor of the city attended a ceremony to unveil a monument to COVID-19 victims. The memorial consists of three steel pillars, representing resilience, community and beginning of. A wreath was laid and residents of the city stood in silence to honor the dead.
“Panic, total panic,” was how one of Codogno’s 15,000 residents, Rosaria Sanna, remembered on Sunday what she had felt at the beginning. And a year later ‘I’m still scared because it’s not over yet.’
Some of her fellow citizens had Sunday Mass in the St. Blaise Church in Codogno is going to light a candle.
The Codogno hospital patient survived it after being transferred to another hospital and was on a respirator for weeks.
But it was in the north-eastern city of Vo, in the neighboring Veneto region, where Italy’s first known COVID-19 death was registered on 21 February 2020.
In Vo’s memorial service, officials planted a tree. A plate was installed with a line by the Italian poet Ugo Foscolo, whose works are widely studied by schoolchildren from the country. The inscription reads: “A man never dies if there is someone who remembers him.”
The first known fatal Italy of COVID-19 was a 77-year-old Vo-man, a retired roofing worker who liked to play cards.
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