Don't Get Sick Until 2022

...or have acute allergies....or break a bone...or have a heart attack...or do anything else that might give you a fever, a cough or any of the other million or so symptoms of the dreaded virus that is controlling the world's healthcare systems.

Pray, sit and read a small illuminating example of why.

Last Monday was a very full day for me, with trips to the embassy to conduct a variety of errands, a studio work visit, making dinner, Skyping with my Dad, and somehow finding time to also work on my online classes. The humid heat is rough here, for me. Add to it a mask in public transit spaces or other indoor locations, poorly cooled (if at all) mass transit, a lot of stuff to haul around on foot, and a studio space that is actually not air conditioned at all but IS partly subterranean (thereby offsetting the full heat, but making it just more humid, really), and I can't keep up with staying properly hydrated.  So I'm not only hot, sweaty and tired, I'm also aggravated at the world. But I have Things To Do. Gotta Keep Moving.

Bedtime. I don't feel well. My lower abdomen hurts. And honestly, I feel a little bit nauseous.

I'm not allowed to get nauseous. The reason for this is that I had surgery for a herniated esophagus years ago, and throwing up, I was warned, would potentially undo the repair work.

So, I take some anti-nausea medication. I take a few other OTC medications to hopefully help with the discomfort. I need to sleep.

And I can't. I still feel nauseous and I still feel general pain in my abdomen.

ALL night. I even tried to throw up. No joy.

I found that I could only comfortably lie on my back.  I'm a side sleeper, but any pressure on my abdomen yielded only pain.

The following day, I stayed in bed, frankly. I was exhausted. I was still uncomfortable. I could doze off for a few minutes here and there, but only on my back.

**************************

By late afternoon, I have a fever. It's not really high, but it's noticeable for me. Head is hot. Extremities are cold.

And of course, all I can think is: CRAP, I have that damned virus. Fever and GI issues are on the symptom list. While the PHS teleworks, I lie on my back and wait to see if the fever might subside. Or if it's a glitch.

An hour into it, it's a few tenths of a degree higher.

By the evening, my PHS phones the embassy physician, shares with her the situation, and she tells us what we already knew: you show up at a hospital ER with a fever and they're going to COVID test you first. Once results are in hand, they will proceed with what to do. Here is the name of COVID hospital closest to your address.  You can't just go to any hospital right now with an undefined fever and expect treatment.

PHS hails a taxi. The hospital in question is no longer a COVID hospital, they say. And besides, we're full. Sorry.

I've forgotten my all-important Italian ID (I would love to choke the person who told me eons ago to only ever carry a photocopy of that ID in my wallet...) anyway. Ride back to apartment. Get ID. Find the next closest COVID hospital. Except that this one is really not close to us AT ALL.

Have I mentioned that Roman roads are full of flaws and Roman cars and buses have zero shock absorption? That pain, with every bump and turn and brake stop. Mmm.

A special entrance for COVID testing. A guy all done up in TYVAC with triple masks on takes a few stats, some blood, scrapes my brain with the long swab for COVID, says nothing about how long anything will take, puts an admission bracelet on my wrist and waves at my husband. "Byeee-byeee." He cannot, of course, come in with me.

I am placed on a gurney. Wheeled into a space where all staff are dressed as if prepared to handle toxic waste, and I am left in a dark corner of what appears to be an examining room that looks out to a hallway with pedestrian barriers that declare lanes in the hallway, and identifies the bathroom as being for COVID patients only.

So I'm on the edge of the COVID ward of the 2nd largest hospital in Italy. It is midnight, and I have with me my phone, a portable charger that is already half-dead thanks to my PHS's need to use it during all of this nightmare, and my purse. We were told by the embassy physician- who behaves as our advocate through much of this - that once the test results were in, I would surely be placed in a room. She is, at the very least, confident that my fever is not COVID-related.

Hours go by. I can hear an elderly man who probably has dementia, crying out, repeatedly. I can hear coughing. Staff are pretty regularly walking in and out of a larger room that I presume has more than a few patients in it. I see other people wheeled in and parked in the hallway or nearby dark rooms. When I get up to find a bathroom I'm allowed to use, I see them, curled up with their phones, a jacket placed over their eyes to block the fluorescent lighting. They look miserable.

I can walk, slowly. Getting in and out of the gurney is torture. Pain is still just as fierce as ever and the fever is still on board. I find a stack of small plastic cups sitting on a desk. I get water from a tap.

At 4am, I am retrieved....for a CT scan of my abdomen. 1 out of 3 people working here speaks a shred of English. The doctors, on the other hand, are quite fine. One says that they had to learn English in order to become physicians.  I'm placed in the room with the noisy machine, struggle mightily to move myself, lie somehow even flatter on my sore back and listen to a man bark through an intercom: BREATHE. DO NOT BREATHE. Over and over.

When it is over, I'm wheeled right back to my dark corner. The gurney is left rails up. I am hemmed in. I think that this must mean that I will be taken somewhere else soon.

But I am not. Some of the people who were brought here to wait - like me - disappear, and others appear. I manage to squeeze myself out and off the gurney, at the open corner between two rails. More cups of water. A bathroom visit. I figure out how to disable a long gurney rail, lower it, and wince my way once again into it.

All this time, I receive no updates on anything. I am given no information. No one talks to me.

By noon the next day, someone appears. They hook me up to two small IVs. Antibiotics and paracetamol (like Tylenol), I'm told.

They leave. I still have zero information about my COVID test or anything else I have had done here.

I get into trouble with one of the COVID nurses because she gives terrible directions to the bathroom I'm supposed to use, and I wind up using a COVID bathroom...or at least I think I do, given her ire. That bathroom, with a lidless toilet and a paper towel dispenser that has been improperly stocked (what IS IT with people not learning how to properly stock paper towel dispensers? I cannot enumerate how many I have taken apart and fixed in public bathrooms in various places....but not this one) adjoins a large room populated by a ring of sick people of all ages. These are not ICU-level COVID people. But if the hospital has taken them on, then you know that there is a decided probability.

The IVs run out pretty early. They are not replaced. Nor are the empties taken away. The paracetamol did absolutely nothing for my pain, strangely.

By 3:30 in the afternoon, I am brought a wheelchair and wheeled to a room. They are still assembling it when I arrive. I am alone in the room, on a floor with other GI patients. The staff is dressed like regular medical staff, but masked perpetually.

A little information starts to flow, but it's confused. Did you get a COVID test? What were the results? Have you had any contact with anyone who has COVID? Where have you been? You're....American? What are you doing in this country? 

Where is this pain? What happens when I press here? What happens when I let go? Do you have a fever?

We will bring you more paracetamol and start up more antibiotics. You have an infection.

At 6:30pm, I ask for a better painkiller. I ask about when I might actually get it. I have lost two full nights of sleep. I will lose my mind too if I don't find a way to rebound.

Adesso, they say. Now.

At 9:30, toradol is fed into my line. Adesso? But I still cannot sleep very well on my side. The gravity feed of the line doesn't work well if I turn over.

But I sleep. A little. Between night sweats.

************************************************

Thursday, Friday, Saturday and now Sunday. Lather, rinse, repeat. Still here.

In addition to the CT scan on day one, I have had two ultrasounds. Blood tests almost every day. One round of blood cultures. I have been administered at least 4 or 5 rounds of one kind of antibiotic plus 2 to 3 rounds of another kind of antibiotic EACH DAY. And by round, I mean something ranging between the size of a mustard bottle and a medium size bag of chips (yes, I know that the suspension in NaCL is part of the volume, but...) The last two days have involved a slow drip of potassium because my blood pressure became low. I am given a daily bag of the usual IV glucose cocktail to keep me from eating the sheets. I did not break that fever for good until yesterday, Saturday, which is not incidentally the first day I've not had a vicious headache. On my arms, I have ugly contusions where someone attempted and failed to hit a vein after another one blew. They've tried all the tricks: back of the hand, under the upper arm. They have dug and dug and dug. I'm far happier when the nurse who comes to do anything like this is a middle-aged woman or man. The young folks - they need more experience before coming at me with sharp things.

If I could have, I would have leapt around the room for joy. It was the first non-fever reading.

This nice lady has the demeanor of a drill sargent. She found me a better IV caddy today, so I'm no longer fighting with the one that behaved like the trashy shopping cart that has three wheels resolutely pointed at the store and one at the parking lot.

The staff have been generally great, the facility is nice and modern enough, and I have seen actual physicians on their rounds at least once a day, if not more often than that. This is a teaching hospital, so they come with a team of young white coats, all crammed into the room, to watch the master (or mistress) speak English with me. We all smile while they deny me any food (broth with child-sized pasta came for the first time today, and I was beside myself...but it was a short-lived win because it was brought to me again this evening and then abruptly taken away) whatsoever, insist that I can only have sips of tea (hot tea with sugar and lemon came in the morning for two days in a row, but that has stopped, and I cannot quite describe the depth of my desolation), speculate about my malady, 'visit my belly' (some of the English speaking has indeed been charming), and string me along without actually telling me the super-factual results of my myriad tests. Now that I have been wheeled down the hall a couple of times, I realize: I am the youngest person on this hallway. Easily.

My tea came the first day in a cup. Then it came the second day in this bowl. I thought: where do they think I'm from? But then thought: wait, that's more tea for me. YAY.

Vegetable broth with pasta 00 ('doppio').  Tinier grain size than the tiniest couscous. 

It has finally, finally been clarified for me today that I have appendicitis and have/had peritonitis upon arrival. The fact that we are still laying on the antibiotics like they're a fashion statement tells me that this isn't just preparation for tomorrow. This is still about wiping out the last several days of infection. Laparoscopic surgery is scheduled for tomorrow morning because, the surgeon said, I 'deserve it.' Some appendicitis cases heal on their own in a couple of days. This has not been just a couple of days. Most of my pain has receded, but the appendix site is still quite sore. So I guess that the concern is that I would not ever heal completely on my own. Better to remove the offending organ that I can live without.

I didn't write all of this to portray the Italian healthcare system as somehow less than good. It IS good, clearly, or how else would the country have the second oldest population of people on the planet (behind Japan)? It also bears mentioning that Italy's COVID numbers are excellent, overall. The care with which i have been submitted to a variety of evaluative measures - plus the gift of protracted time to observe, to measure, to treat...ironically, in this context, I realize - tells me that i wound up in good hands.

I didn't write all of this to induce your sympathy either.

I wrote all of this as a lesson. It is one that your friendly neighborhood healthcare providers can teach you too. It's about how a pandemic changes the way you can get care and how long you have to wait for care.

Believe me, I had some time to think about this as I lay in feverish pain on a gurney in a dark corner, considering how I needed to be thankful that I was by an open window and that the night air was cool enough to warrant bringing that hospital sheet over my shoulders. I was starving, but thankful that I had found a water source.

I am not and was not infected with COVID. Thankful for that, too.

But I think it came close to killing me anyway.

COVID changed how quickly I could be seen by a physician. It literally and figuratively kept me in the dark. It made a very large hospital even more capable of confusion and crossed signals. Even if it is not on the rise here right now, it still takes up its own resources and space and staff, therefore making a huge facility perpetually full. I waited at least some of that long, long time because there was literally no room in the non-COVID part of the hospital for me.

COVID make me SICKER. 15 hours on that gurney. One dose of paracetamol. One dose of antibiotics. Definite and prolonged dehydration. What if my appendix had burst while I was there alone? What if the peritonitis had become more and more acute?

By virtue of its consumption of time and materials and person power, COVID made me so sick that I (an otherwise healthy person, it turns out, given the battery of tests that I've been given here), the middle aged chick whose hospital stays prior to this amounted to one, and that was a planned, overnight post-surgery, have been in the Pope's hospital for almost a full week...and I don't have a definite discharge date yet. 

I seriously doubt that any readers of this fall into the bizarre group of mask-regulation-buckers out there - and trust me, I wouldn't touch them with a 10-mile pole - but obviously, you all know what to do.

And besides that, don't get sick. Don't hurt yourselves. Don't have accidents. Stick close to home, wash your damned hands and understand this: even if you do all those things, that virus can still make you sick - or dead - without ever having infected you.

Post-Lockdown Florence

It pays to utilize social media for keeping up with things that are happening on a local level.  And right now in Italy, just about everything is happening on a local level. Every region and city is allowed to take a slower time to reopen, if necessary, depending on virus data. I'm not sure, but I do think that Florence took a little extra time. All of Tuscany has been averaging less than 10 new cases per day for awhile, though.

The Pitti Palace in Florence is hosting an exhibition of the works of Giovanna Garzoni, a 17th century artist whose small still life paintings were collected by the Medici family.  Her work, like that of many female artists in centuries when very few female artists were known and even fewer were collected by such prestigious families as the Medicis, was more often housed in the collector's wunderkammer, or cabinet of wonders. It was thought that a female artist was so unusual that the work she produced should be in the same kind of collection that also contained rare, natural wonders like unusual seashells or pricey objects like painted porcelain from the far East.

Since Italians were finally freed to travel between regions on June 3rd, I declared that we should take a short weekend trip to see the exhibition. We booked train travel and a b&b we already knew, and traveled this past Saturday morning.

This meant, of course, that we could experience post-lockdown train travel. When we booked this little 90 minute sojourn, we didn't understand why our seats were not together, but we figured that since we went for a cheap purchase (you sometimes have to pay extra on this continent for selecting seats on planes and trains), we might not be able to do that. No big deal, we thought.

But in reality, we were seated at a table and across from each other...diagonally. No one was seated next to or directly across from anyone on the train. That was clearly a post-lockdown virus control measure undertaken by the train company.

We underwent what I would call a little health security theater as well. Checking temperatures at entrances to buildings and spaces with lessened social distancing is a superfluous gesture when you consider that asymptomatic carriers of this particular virus are still quite communicable.  But lots of places and entities (namely, the Italian government) insist upon it, so...well, ok. Upon entering Rome's Termini station area for ticketed passengers, we had one of those temperature 'guns' aimed at each of our heads. Upon departing Florence's Santa Maria Novella station, we were monitored by a stationary device, for which we had to be sure we were not wearing any glasses (perhaps because lenses would reflect the technology and prohibit an accurate reading?). Yet another of those devices was placed at an exit from the train platforms in the arrivals area of Termini in Rome, too.

Our b&b owner greeted us warmly upon our arrival. We all wore masks during our conversation.  Hand sanitizer was located in several places throughout the space. We learned that as soon as hotels and b&bs in Florence were given a firm date for re-opening, they all undertook enormous measures to clean their spaces from top to bottom. Nevermind that while the virus is known to live for days on some surfaces and these places had not seen guests in four months...they still rigorously cleaned. The only hiccup for us in all of this was the fact that the room air conditioning units could not be run yet because - again, Italian government mandate! - they had not been thoroughly cleaned by a professional. Fortunately, we were supplied with a fan (not that we are opposed to opening windows, but no screens, and blood-sucking bugs in the humid, Arno river environment kept us from doing that). Our lovely breakfast would have ordinarily been a buffet, except that current Italian restrictions on that practice meant that we had to ask our owner to dole out what we each wanted instead.

Casa dei Tintori is on the street of the cloth dyers...The building itself retains some of its original features as an old workshop for dyeing

I do hope that it is clear in this post that I am merely describing what this experience was like...not complaining. I want to detail all of the big and small actions that were taken during this unique phase in modern Italian life. And I also want to stress that these actions largely struck us as warranted and remarkably reassuring.

As we strolled around town after our lunch at Pizza Divina (incredible stuff here, offered by a really sweet couple who do all of the work), we shopped a little, thunderstorms set in, and we spent time in a church I don't ever recall previously visiting. San Salvatore in Ognisanti (Saint Salvador in all the saints) houses some Renaissance works, as well as the bones of one well-known Renaissance painter: Sandro Boticelli.

It is believed that the man kneeling in the above region - in red - is Amerigo Vespucci. 

This crucifix is attributed to Giotto di Bondone, the 'Father of the Renaissance.' 

St. Jerome, by Domenichino Ghirlandaio.

Boticelli requested that he be buried near the woman he loved, Simonetta Vespucci. His grave is near the foot of her grave in the same chapel. 

One important observation to make of this short trip is the generosity we experienced at every turn, it seemed. 40% of Florence's economy is supported by tourism. Plenty of people were walking the streets this past weekend. Interestingly, Italian tour guides were giving tours to...Italians! So, that's great. I'm still of the opinion that Italy should belong to just Italy for a little while.  As hard as her citizens fought to arrive at this point, there should be at least some room for their own leisure, however they can enjoy it.

But there we were, not looking like Italians, and at least when speaking to one another, not sounding like Italians. And when I visited a leather shop to admire a bag, I was offered a 15 euro discount on the price without my even pretending to be indecisive or enacting any other tactics to bargain the way that visitors like to think they should in such situations. I have learned that discounts typically happen here because you are a neighborhood fixture, a repeat customer, the good friend of a known customer, or someone doesn't want to make loose or small change (seriously). I have learned that the more hardcore business of bargaining still does in fact happen, but in some cases - like a business owner's four month stretch of zero income - it would be absolutely crass to even go there. But he offered. And then he explained: we were his first customers since the lockdown had been lifted on June 3rd...and add to that four months of NO possibility of customers.

I'm not sure if just anyone can quite appreciate the moment of hearing that, unless you have walked a kilometer in their shoes.

And on top of the low-priced bag, I was offered a free leather keychain as well.

(Don't they need our money? The Spouse asked. Why are they not taking it?)

A paper marbling business owner was demonstrating his craft in his shop, and we stopped in to watch.
He struck up a conversation. Before we had left, it had been established that I sometimes make books like the ones he has for sale, and he handed me his card, saying: come back, and I'll let YOU make some of this paper.

We went to our favorite restaurant - a family joint. We were immediately recognized by the waiter. He took great care of us, after having us fill out forms that documented our presence in the dining room that evening.  Every customer had to do this. How's that for being prepared for contact tracing, if the need arises?

Sorry to all the vegetarians who weren't forewarned. Tuscan beef is definitely worth the occasional sampling. It is topped with 'lardo,' or pig's fat. 

Marco told us about how business had been picking up since reopening a little over a week beforehand. It's not a really tourist place, so the neighborhood regulars were eager to go out and have their regular Tuscan fare served in a place that has a sign that reads: 'We have no wifi. We have wine.'

When The Spouse said that he felt as though Florence was really doing a great job with reopening, Marco bluntly said: hey, Italy cannot afford to lockdown twice.

I cannot describe the utter joy of pairing this wine with this messy, homemade tiramisu. 

Often, you can be offered an 'amaro' at the end of a dinner at an Italian restaurant.  This is similar to the way that we call all bandages 'Band-aids.' An amaro is one kind of digestivo, a high proof alcohol that is served in a small glass at the end of a meal, intended to enhance digestion. THIS stuff - which was freely recommended at my behest - was not nearly as strong as others I have tried. It was quite nice, and while lemony, not sugary the way limoncello can be. I could imagine it as a hot toddy, too.

The lemony digestivo he offered me that night was only made and sold at a monastery near Fiesole. We expressed a little disappointment to learn that the only way to get it was to go there. He then said: call me before you come here again, drive yourselves, and we can make a plan to go to that monastery together. Before I got back to the b&b, I had a WhatsApp from Marco, so he's now officially a contact.

Sunday morning, we went to the Pitti Palace. By this point, I'm thinking that the mention of everyone having to wear masks indoors is unnecessary...but maybe to some readers, it isn't. I would not have been allowed in any business, restaurant or museum I visited in Florence if I had not worn a mask the entire time (except for eating and drinking). This was uncomfortable for me, as I am such a heat-sensitive person, and I'm finding that all the sweating that is happening under my mask is not doing anything great for my complexion...but the rules are the rules. Unlike our Raphael exhibition experience of the prior weekend here in Rome, we were not restricted to a tiny cohort of people entering at each 5 minute interval.  We were instead permitted the option of wandering the way we usually would in a museum. Of course, there was no queue to enter, and the museum was in no way crowded.

The 'back side' of the Ponte Vecchio jewelry shops.

Make no mistake: many businesses are still shuttered. The jewelry vendors on the famous Ponte Vecchio depend on tourists for much of their income (largely because so few of them sell anything original, anymore...only one or two businesses create and produce work on-site that has some originality). I just recently read that rent on this bridge is as high as18,000 euros a month. That's a lot of gold and stones. Italians are not going to spend what little money they have on those things right now. So, for the foreseeable future, these vendors are not open for business. 

Any time you see an Artemisia Gentileschi, you should take a minute. This is one of those versions by her - of a popular subject at the time - which is pregnant with dramatic tension. Old Testament heroine Judith is escaping under cover of night after having beguiled, seduced and beheaded an invading Assyrian general named Holofernes. She and her maidservant, Abra, have heard something that we cannot see.

Interestingly, this Raphael painting was not commandeered by the museum holding the Raphael show in Rome. 

...and here is who I came to see.  Giovanna Garzoni. Still life painter, scientific illustrator, silk painter. 

These tempera on vellum paintings are almost stippled, if you inspect them up close. This appearance could be a feature of vellum as a a very thin animal skin with still-present hair follicle holes, but it could also be due to the way that Garzoni had to apply the paint in order for it to sit and dry on the surface. 

The idea that her work was showcased in a Medici wunderkammer is underscored by virtue of the inclusion of objects typical to such cabinets of wonders.

(MAN, I like so many more things here with substantially less crowds)

When we decided to stop our wandering (the Pitti is HUGE, so I think visitors tend to wipe out before they complete the whole series of exhibitions and spaces), we visited the cafe for a coffee and tea in the inner courtyard of the large building. Every time a museum visitor got up from their table, a masked employee came to disinfect the table and chairs.

We strolled through the Oltrarno district towards a recommended lunch spot, and stopped at a store selling linen garments for men and women. We each tried on a few things. We each bought one garment. The woman running the store explained to us that her son was a graphic artist, an illustrator...really, a man who draws fumetti (the Italian nickname for comics, which literally means 'the smokers,' referring to the speech bubbles, which look like smoke clouds, for characters) and she showed us his publications on the countertop. He provided cute images for some of the linen t-shirts.  She pointed to the large Epson printer in the back, explaining that they took his designs and printed them on the shirts using the machina. It's charming to learn the different things that require power or fuel for operation being called a machina (machine) here. A car is a machina. So is a large format printer or a computer.

I don't know if it was because we exhibited interest, or it was because we made minor purchases, but before we left, she had slipped into the bag two fumetti booklets as well as a another full-size book also published by her son. No charge.

On the way to lunch, we managed to get into the church of Santa Felicita, which is best known for its Capponi chapel with Jacopo Pontormo's Descent from the Cross, a Mannerist masterpiece. Not everyone is familiar with Mannerism, a short-lived movement inspired by the Last Judgment fresco in the Sistine Chapel, with attenuated, long-limbed bodies and extreme emphasis on graceful form to the expense of anatomical accuracy (I mean, do look at the crouching figure in the foreground, impossibly on tip-toe, who has more vertebrae than humanly possible). Pontormo's work takes this somber subject and oddly places nothing of serious meaning in the center of the composition.  There is just a cluster of hands, instead. A cluster of hands surrounded by these highly keyed colors in acid-bright hues.

On the adjacent wall inside the same chapel. 

The thurible - the censer that holds burning incense in Roman Catholic churches - was still smoking, post-mass. 

Lunch was a pleasant affair, outdoors, with a pizza that ticked ALL my boxes. Not long after, we took a train home.

Yes indeedy, folks, it's now officially time for caprese salads...I don't want them until tomatoes are in season. 

Hot salami, gorgonzola, red onions and mozzarella. This counts as one of my top 5, here. And that is saying something. If you want to know where to find this or the other pizza place, just contact me.

We had a little time to stroll more comfortably through town on our way back to the train station. So here are a few photos:

Lorenzo Ghiberti's self-portrait, included on his Gates of Paradise (this is a replica).

The entire train station had these directional arrows on the floor, designed to direct traffic in a space that is ordinarily quite disorganized. 

On the ride back, I thought about how it took Italy four months to get to this.

ALL of that. All the cases, the deaths and recoveries. All the weeks of staying at home. The constantly moving target of a lockdown lift. The utter quiet in cities that ordinarily rage with noise, punctuated only by ambulance sirens. Balconies hosting singers and musicians and fluttering tricolor flags. 

Italy took the hard route, of really and truly shutting down, and prolonging that shutdown beyond one benchmark after another...and now, issuing decree after decree, gradually - almost painfully, it is so slow - allowing layers of societal movements and spaces and behaviors and norms to return.

Only it is not normal. 

As our b&b owner said: I am struggling with this mask, as I feel as if half of my communication is lost. I might as well have my hands tied behind my back, too.  

Italy has had her hands tied behind her back in a number of ways.  But she has made a great difference in the public health crisis that forcibly hit her in February.

Below is where the rest of the world is, currently.

We watched plenty of footage of America's justifiable moral outrage over police brutality and deep racial divides that persist.
We are wondering why, if Black Lives Matter (and there is no question...they DO) - and, for instance, a very substantial portion of Montgomery Alabama's hospitalized COVID19 patients are people of color - America seems to have no comparable moral outrage for a public health disaster that continues unabated. So many government officials on local, state and national levels would prefer to ignore it, just as it rises up to demand attention. Again.

Italy's nationwide movement to rein in a virus that was swiftly killing its elderly population was not so swift, initially.  It took a visit from Chinese physicians who had already dealt with the problem at home to visit the Lombardy region, render judgement and make hardcore recommendations. And that, friends, is when the lockdown 'got real,' to use common parlance. Meanwhile, American healthcare workers face what they faced two months ago PLUS the reality that many of their fellow citizens have elected to throw them - and any potential victims, which is a wholly unpredictable number of people of all ages, sizes and states of health - under the proverbial bus. Curve? Didn't we flatten it? Yay! We're done with all of those pesky little (and trust me, in most states, if they existed at all, they were minimal) restrictions on our freedom-we've-confused-with-unbridled-'me-first-itis.' Cities and states with spiking case counts are, in some cases, simultaneously refusing (not avoiding or dismissing...but REFUSING) to issue any mask-wearing ordinances for citizens, despite the reality that several studies now show that it may be the single best thing we can do to de-escalate spread. No state is like any other state in virus data collection and, more importantly, forthright reporting. Remember those meat processing plant outbreaks? Wonder why you don't hear about them anymore? Some may have been dealt with, but how would you know, since the primary way that people have been lulled into a false sense of security has been to simply not report the data? The plants themselves are not required to report. Very high-ranking officials are urging states to put out disinformation that is so blatantly false that the very action of making such assertions could take your breath away. It should be infuriating that someone would presume that you, Mr. or Ms. American Citizen, are really that stupid.
How did a pandemic become a mere inconvenience?

Where is the moral outrage?

Italy cannot afford another lockdown.
Can America afford to lose another 100,000 citizens (by October???) to a 'pretend' pandemic?
She has already and very recently proven that she can mobilize and express enough unified outrage to prompt change. So she can no longer shrug her shoulders and assert that she can't do or say anything significant about a big problem, can she?

And understand this: the EU has declared that it will review other countries epidemiological status before considering whether to allow them to have access. In other words, if you have sharply rising case counts where you live, it is highly unlikely you will be welcomed for non-essential travel. This, America, is just another reality check for you.