“I remember the trips on the deserted highway of the Sun, alone, with my service car and the flashing lights. This was really the most alienating thing. And at a certain point the fear. The fear of getting infected, because what for everyone it was a moment of isolation for me it was instead a period of frenzy and contacts. It seemed to have been a blitzkrieg and instead it became a trench warfare with all the heavy effects of trench warfare “. Thus the virologist Fabrizio Pregliasco, professor at the State University of Milan and president of the Anps, one of the major voluntary associations in the health field, entrusts the memories of him to Adnkronos Salute two years after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy.
“It was February 13, 2020”, a week before the first case of Covid was identified in Codogno, “when right here in my office – says the virologist – we met to take stock of operations at the hospital level and we had a census of materials. We still had some from the latest Ebola risk that had arisen and – he says with a smile – we thought ‘yes come on we have a thousand suits, we have masks. it was enough for a week. That was it, “he says, becoming serious again. And “I remember in the waves of the pandemic the waves of anguish and discussions on the various issues that have followed one another from the lack of masks to vaccines. How much stress”.
‘They applauded us from the balconies, today we are all tired’
“At first they applauded us from the balconies when they went to pick up patients in overalls but then – says the doctor – when there was the reopening we were annoyed because being near the desk of someone who could have been infected and therefore infecting created problems. Many colleagues – he says – had to give up and stop doing service for a while. This is what happens in trench warfare: from the emotion and adrenaline of the immediate we pass to the weariness and loneliness of the soldier. Today for me but also for my collaborators, for the operators who are still in the Covid department today, there is an element of fatigue, stress, almost repulsion “. Among the volunteers “some have run out, moved away, there is difficulty in continuing to operate”.
But “I hope – is the hope of Pregliasco – that this transition towards normality will bring us back to a reassurance and above all to a pacification, because – he notes – what I see, albeit in a minority of people, is really a contrast. I am also involved in scientific dissemination, the definition of ‘viro-star’, which is demeaning and negative, is significant. We have not come out better – says bitter – but it is a reaction that I see linked to this trench warfare that somehow unfortunately we cannot abandon “.
Pregliasco, however, has not lost the passion for his work. “At the beginning – he admits – I did not imagine it would be such a huge and long thing but for 30 years I have been studying, deepening and dealing with epidemiology, respiratory viruses and I felt a bit like second lieutenant Drogo of the Desert of the Tartars: a life of waiting and preparation for battle “. So the arrival of the pandemic in a certain sense “gave me a greater charge”. But “I don’t have time” and when everything is over “I would like to go back to spend some time with my partner Carolina”.
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