Bergamo is stationary, there is no more traffic, the streets are empty “as in August” according to the wishes of the mayor Giorgio Gori, and the few passers-by on foot are increasingly wearing masks with a filter. One of the shopping temples, the Oriocenter, appears deserted, and many stores have also closed early on any new decrees. “This is a war to be won – says Paolo Agnelli, the king of pots around the world -. Let’s stop and then we’ll try to leave as if it were a post-war period, but now let’s stop, it’s the only thing to do ». And when the industry says so, it means that fear has pervaded everything, because the enemy is invisible and imperceptible until he arrives and strikes, and he also takes fifty and sixty-year-olds to the hospital without oxygen.
It is the era of the Covid 19 coronavirus, which no one expected with such arrogance, but which has arrived, fast and lethal: so much so that some traffic remained in Viale Pirovano, the one that faces the monumental cemetery. The mortuary chambers of the city hospitals (Pope John in the first place, but also the Humanitas Gavazzeni Clinics), no longer hold up, and the Municipality must do its part, giving space and pitiful rest even to the remains of those who arrived at the hospital from the outside city and died of “interstitial pneumonia”, the main effect of the virus without a vaccine.
But even the mortuary of the city cemetery is no longer enough: to welcome the coffin, before the cremation, the Temple of Ognissanti was also opened, the modern church of the cemetery, occupied on average by 40 coffins every day. And if on an ordinary Saturday in early March the ordinary deaths recorded in the city could have been between 4 and 5, now the average is terrifying, and almost 20.
It happens in Bergamo and also in Zogno, where the parish priest decided to play once only the death knell because otherwise, the funeral bells should continue all day.
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