Italy Day30 – To Peak or Not To Peak

Here in Italy the official nation-wide Lockdown started on 9th March, however for some of us it was as early as 27th February. As you can imagine, it is hard to keep motivated even for highly motivated people. I have to say that this moment I’m going through is personally the most challenging to date. I miss my family, my friends, my life, the full functioning of my company… What my team and myself have worked so hard for, all the new extraordinary itineraries for the season created are on hold, we feel like that mustang just before being set free in a rodeo.  But most of all, ‘I’m scared’, and this is something that I have never felt before… I’ve never been this scared… Scared for my family, my friends, extremely shaken by the amount of deaths world wide… 

Thankfully in all of this madness we can still find new ways to connect with each other, to help us keep sane. However, like with everything in life there’s that other side, the bombardment of fake information that we are subjected to and that causes us, already in a vulnerable state, to be even more distressed. Rules change so fast from one day to the other, that you feel like you can’t keep up and are left questioning even the most basic ones. We ask ourselves what we can and cannot do, can we go for a run, can we hug a loved one, how many times and for how long can you take your dog out? 

What’s upsetting too, is being psychoanalysed on how you are reacting to this situation, if you are overreacting, if you are doing enough. Mean comments, pain shaming (you could be worse), these kinds of comments create more damage than we think in an already delicate situation.

My dear Friends, this will only lead to discord and conflict so we need to cut ourselves a break. I believe that after a month of being cooped up in our homes we are allowed a moment to freak out, cry, vent, be irritated or experience whatever other emotions we are struggling with. Because this is indeed a truly horrendous situation. It’s nothing that anyone has prepared us for, either psychologically or physically, so give yourself a break and give others a break too… We are in this together, we need to trust that each and everyone of us is doing the best we can. We don’t know how long this is going to take, so we need to learn from scratch a completely new way of thought. 

Personally I’ve decided, as always, to be true to myself and do what works for me, and that’s discussing this issue and sharing what I know… Am I facing some deep issues? Sure! Who isn’t?? Being stuck at home for me has been and is very hard, although for sometime now I believe I’m kind of arriving at the “acceptance stage”… I think…mmm Tell you what, I’ll keep you posted on this one!

Like everyone else, I have been constantly following the official reports. Sadly our confinement has been prolonged and prolonged to the point that we have accepted that no one really knows when this is going to end. For now, we look at the graphs that officials send and, here in Italy, apparently we have reached the peak* . This should be the moment when the flattening of the curve** hopefully starts to occur.  And if this is really the moment we have been waiting for in the last few days, we need to hold on and keep going, which means keep staying home. Now more than ever we need to make things continue along this path, we cannot give up now and think it is all over. It is hard, but we can see and hope that our efforts have really made a difference and are taking us towards the right direction. So, this is a good thing, but we’ll not be singing la macarena ‘yet’ or start going out and about. As at this moment, if we act carelessly, that is, start not respecting the lockdown, our numbers of cases can suddenly spike again and we are back to square one. At the moment there’s no cure or vaccine*** for covid-19, we are still looking for a ‘’David’’ to slay this giant. Actually the idea is that when time for phase 2 will come, we will possibly go through an extended serological testing****. That might possibly be the solution to start with a gradual  re-opening of the business activities, allowing the people who have previously contracted the virus to go out first.

So, for now, we basically need to: 
⇒ reboot our way of thinking
⇒ respect the lockdown
⇒ strictly maintain the social distance
⇒ washing hands and no touching our faces
And simply make this our temporary new way of living .. but together, holding on to each other, though in a new and different way, we will do it!

Ana Serra
Self taught

*to reach the peak – to reach the maximum number of infections per day
**flattening of the curve – the curve of infections is a bell-shaped curve. First it goes up, it reaches a peak and it eventually goes down. Flattening that curve means reaching a lower number of infections per day and keeping that same level for a longer period in time. The total amount of infections will not decrease overall, but it will decrease that of daily new infections, which should prevent a collapse of our Hospitals and ICUs (Intensive Care Units).
***no cure or vaccine – although there are some medicines that have shown some effectiveness, clinical researchers cannot validate a treatment without a previous  randomized controlled trial which requires time and a certain minimum number of tested patients.  Right now some existing medicines are being tested in off-label modality (outside the standard uses mentioned on their leaflets), but we might have to wait a few more days/weeks before the testings can prove the efficacy of those treatments. For what concerns a vaccine, for the time being no one seems really able to tell when that will be ready.
****serological testing – Blood test to verify if the person has or has not created an antibody for the virus. If the person tested has created antibodies, it means he/she has been infected with the virus at some point, regardless of whether or not he/she has had symptoms.