CODOGNO, Italy (AP) – With crowning ceremonies, tree planting and religious services, Italians celebrated on Sunday a year since their country experienced the first known death of COVID-19.
Northern Italian cities were the first to be hit hard by the pandemic and put under blockade, and residents paid tribute to the dead. Italy, with about 95,500 confirmed virus deaths, has the second highest pandemic rate in Europe, after Great Britain. Experts say the virus has also killed many others that have never been tested.
While the first wave of infections largely involved Lombardy and other northern regions, a second wave from autumn 2020 spread across the country. The number of new coronavirus infections has remained stubbornly high, despite a series of restrictions on travel between regions and, in some cases, between cities. In addition, gyms, cinemas and theaters have been closed and restaurants and bars are expected to close in the early evening. There is a curfew across the country from 10 pm to 5 am.
So far, Italy has confirmed 2.8 million cases.
It was at the hospital in Codogno, Lombardy, where a doctor recognized what would go down in medical history as the first known COVID-19 case in the West in a patient unrelated to the outbreak in Asia, where coronavirus infections initially emerged . The diagnosis was made on the night of February 20, 2020, in a 38-year-old athletic man.
Near the Red Cross office in Codogno on Sunday, the governor of Lombardy and the mayor of the city attended a ceremony to inaugurate a monument to the victims of COVID-19. The memorial consists of three steel pillars, representing resilience, community and a new beginning. A wreath was placed and the townspeople remained silent to honor the dead.
“Panic, total panic”, was like one of the 15,000 residents of Codogno, Rosaria Sanna, on Sunday, remembered what she felt at the beginning. And a year later, “I’m still scared because it’s not over yet.”
Some of his fellow citizens lit candles during Sunday Masses at St. Blaise Church in Codogno.
The Codogno hospital patient survived, after being transferred to another hospital and spending weeks on a respirator.
But it was in the city of Vo, in the northeast of the country, in the neighboring region of Veneto, where the first known death of COVID-19 in Italy was recorded on February 21, 2020.
At Vo’s memorial service, the officers planted a tree. A plaque was installed that mentions a verse by the Italian poet Ugo Foscolo, whose works are widely studied by students in the country. The inscription says: “A man never dies if there is someone who remembers him”.
The first known fatality in Italy in COVID-19 was a 77-year-old Vo man, a retired carpenter who enjoyed playing cards.
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