Viva Italia!

I'm going to momentarily interrupt this blog's usual solipsism to give a more objective view of how Italy is dealing with the pandemic. My source is Stethoscope on Rome, a blog by Susan Levenstein, an American medical doctor based in the Eternal City. "Stethoscope..." has been a wonderful source of solid information about the pandemic, not just in Italy but all over, and particularly about COVID treatments and vaccines, good, bad, and worthless. I highly recommend it. 

Not long after we arrived in Fidenza "Stethoscope..." reported at some length on the state of things in Italy. Levenstein began by contrasting a photo of mostly maskless commuters crowding into the Tube in London with one taken in a crowded Italian train, where just about everyone was masked up. "Italy’s vaccination campaign is now neck and neck with the UK, and it’s based overwhelmingly on the highly effective mRNA vaccine," Levenstein wrote. "As you see, they’re good about masks too… and, not surprisingly, they’re having much less of a Delta surge."

With her permission, here's the rest of her Italy report:

Italy is doing a lot better than the US in terms of both vaccination rates and the state of the pandemic. As of September 12^th, 87% of Italians over 60, but only 78% of Americans over 65, were fully vaccinated (note the different denominators). And 81% of Italians over 12 and 74% of the entire population were at least partially vaccinated – compared with 75% and 64% of Americans. 

One way Italy has been encouraging vaccination is by making Green Passes (vaccination or recent COVID-19 or negative swab) obligatory to access everything from restaurants to long-distance trains. Just last night my husband and I had the mild thrill of having our QR codes scanned for the very first time, to see a dance performance. When recent demonstrations against the Green Pass managed to turn out only a few dozen people, hard-core activists decided to go for violence instead of popularity, putting together stashes of knives and brass knuckles for next time around, until the cops broke up the plot.

In October all employees will need Green Passes if they want to work in person. Teachers already have to show theirs at the gate, and vaccine refusers foot the bill for their own triweekly antigen swabs, as well they should. Hopefully vaccination will soon become mandatory for teachers. It already is for health care workers, and since August hardcore novaxers (fewer than 3% of doctors and nurses, but in some regions 10-12% of nonprofessional staff) are starting to be suspended without pay. 

Between high vaccine coverage, the Green Pass, and unwavering adherence to masking and distancing, Italy has kept the pandemic in check even in the era of the hyper-contagious Delta variant. Yes, infections  and deaths have gone up a bit recently: 

But there’s no comparison to the American horror show:

I

In one way, though, Italy is similar to the US: roughly speaking, where vaccination rates are low, case rates are high. If you believe in science, that’s no surprise at all.

Vaccination rates (left), weekly case numbers (right)

Passing

Before we got here we'd read how everyone in Europe who'd been vaccinated was getting a Green Pass, an app on their phone with a QR code that permits entry to concerts, museums, restaurants, and other public places. Eager for American tourists to help boost their economies, the European Union announced that the USA's unimpressive cardboard vaccination cards would also be accepted for entry to the continent's cultural goodies. But friends of friends, Americans in France, reported that their experience was that the U.S. card was regarded as valid proof of vaccination exactly nowhere. And we could find no information about how people who are not in the Italian health system could get in on the Green Pass action.

Then we discovered that California had its own proof-of-vaccination app, complete with QR code, and before we left for Italy we managed to download it onto both of our phones. Surely the two systems, California's and Europe's, would connect with each other.

Looks official, doesn't it?

What a ridiculous delusion. At our beloved local bar we quickly discovered that the Green Pass reader regarded the California QR code as meaningless gobbledygook. Luckily the bar has expanded its outdoor space, where vaccination requirements don't apply, and the weather's been great, so we were able to get cappuccinos and spritzes despite being undocumented. But I worried we'd be reduced to a solid diet of home cooking once the weather turns cold.

Pam took me over to the town tourist office, since surely they'd know how Americans can get in on local eateries and activities. But the woman there had never heard of the American vaccination card and assured us no one accepted it as a Green Pass substitute.

Now here's where the wisdom of settling in Fidenza, where Pam and Romano live, versus any other place in Italy was borne out once again. Pam took me to her local health office and through some kind of Pam magic got an appointment with a doctor who looked at our identity documents and our vax cards and tapped away at his computer for a bit and announced that we were now "a posto." Whether anyone can do this, or only friends of Pam and Romano, I do not know.

In any case, the next day we each received an email from the Ministry of Health announcing that our "green COVID-19 certification" was now available and giving us a special code. Danny printed out the emails (of course) and Pam told us to take them to the pharmacy across the street, because pharmacists seem to be central to the Green Pass system. 

At first the dottoressa behind the counter asked for our Italian health cards and told us that we couldn't get a Green Pass without one, and I feared we'd run into one of those insurmountable blockages that Italian bureaucracy is famous for. But then she studied the email for a minute and said, "Eh, va bene!" and a moment later presented us with paper print-outs of our Green Pass certificates.

We're legal!

We still haven't figured out how to get our Green Passes onto our phones, but the paper version works just fine. We proved it the next evening when we went to Parma to see a production of Rossini's Il Signor Bruschino at the Parma Conservatory, featuring some of Romano's students. The performance was held outdoors, in the Conservatory's large wisteria-draped courtyard, with seats placed far apart and everyone except the singers in masks. But even so, everyone in the audience had to first present their QR code to a gentleman with a Green Card reader, which beeped cheerily and displayed a big green checkmark as each person passed inspection. Our paper QR codes worked just as well as everyone else's digital version. The delightful production of Rossini's one-act confection, with Romano's terrific young singers, was the perfect way to celebrate.

We gave our passes another workout the next day when we went for lunch at one of our favorite local restaurants, a fixed-price lunch place with great atmosphere and solid homestyle food. It's all indoor dining so a Green Pass is required to enter. But no problem for us!

In tribute to Italy's commendably hard line on vaccinations, I ordered pesto di cavallo, that is, horse steak tartar. While American anti-vaxxers are consuming veterinary doses of the anti-worming medicine ivermectin--which they call "horse paste"--in the vain hope that it will protect them from COVID, I was happy to consume a plateful of horse paste, Italian style. It's probably no more effective as a COVID preventive, but without a doubt it's a lot tastier.  

For your own good

As we were getting ready to return to Fidenza, I fretted about the usual things--what to pack, how early we should get to the airport, how many issues of The New Yorker I should bring in my carry-on as emergency reading--and also about the risk of inhaling a Delta viron or two during the course of our journey. What had us waking up in the middle of the night before we finally got on the plane, however, wasn't the threat of  COVID but the ever-shifting list of COVID-related hoops we'd have to jump through before we'd be allowed back into Italy.

Remember when a passport and an airplane ticket were all you needed to board a flight from the U.S. to Europe? No longer. Lured by a low business-class fare, we'd booked tickets on British Air, which meant flying through London. But thanks to Boris Johnson's mishandling of the pandemic (or, some say, European bitterness about Brexit), anyone traveling from the United Kingdom to Italy had to get a negative COVID test result within 48 hours before arriving, a full day less than the 72-hour grace period for people coming direct from the U.S. And this was true even for those who, like us, were only going to be in Heathrow airport for an hour or two. 

Meanwhile the U.K. requires a "passenger locator form," so that if someone on the flight does come down with COVID, all passengers can be tracked down, although exactly for what purpose isn't specified. This is a lengthy form, to be filled out online, wherein you must specify everything from your seat number to any address you're occupying before, during, and after your flight. 

The European Union has its own equally extensive passenger locator form, also online. Both of these forms are supposed to be filled out at the last minute, and if anything changes--a leg of your flight, a seat number--you have to do the whole thing over again. 

Italy also wanted proof of vaccination before you got on a plane heading there. We had the vaccine cards showing that we'd gotten our shots last spring, but I worried that no one would believe these scraps of badly printed cardboard were really official documents. Shortly before we left we discovered that the state of California had quietly introduced an online version of the vax card, complete with a QR code. Figuring that would be useful, we spent considerable time wrestling with the California system and getting these documents onto our phones, since that seems to be the preferred way to prove your vax status among civilized people.

On top of all that, British Air urged us to input all of our information, including our vaccine status, into some third-party app that would theoretically allow us to breeze through check-in by showing that we'd already met all the above requirements. What a lovely idea, right? Even if it meant sharing our personal data with yet another faceless entity. Unfortunately, the app was something of a disaster, and we were frantically trying to get it to work right up until we left for the airport.

A selection of our travel documents, assembled by Danny.

Most stressful of all was getting the COVID tests. A rapid antigen test wouldn't do; a PCR molecular test is required. Our health system provides them for free, but with a two- to three-day wait for results. To make that 48-hour deadline, we had to find someplace that could turn the results around in less than 24 hours. Danny spent days scouring the internet and found several places that were happy to give results in a few hours but charged hundreds of dollars for this usually free test. Eventually he located a reputable outfit that worked out of Oakland Airport, about half an hour from us, and promised low-cost results in six hours. We made an appointment for Saturday afternoon, the day before our Sunday flight.

Unfortunately, their website proved to be chockablock with misinformation. When we arrived for our appointment we discovered that, despite what the website said, this location didn't do the test we needed. However, they were able to send us over to another site a few minutes away to get the tests. More worrying, we learned it might take up to 24 hours to get the results, not the six hours the website had promised. ("We know," the folks at the testing site said. "We keep telling them to fix it.")  With our check-in time less than 24 hours away, we spent the evening anxiously checking our phones, willing the results to appear.

Danny woke me up a little after 3 a.m. The results were in, and we'd tested negative. Now we just had to upload the test report and add that information to our various documents, which we spent a couple of anxious middle-of-the-night hours doing. 

We also tried to check in for our flight. But despite having all our information at the electronic ready, British Air informed us that we would have to go through check-in in person, so that our documentation could be reviewed. Remembering the endless check-in lines we'd waited in during previous trips, we decided to get to the airport even earlier than we'd planned.

Back in the days before there was an internet, Danny's travel preparations always included preparing a folder with all flight information, hotel reservations, and so on in writing. He's maintained that practice even as more and more people, mostly younger, do everything with their phones. And so his carry-on included print-outs of all our flight and seat numbers, taxi confirmation, locator forms, test results, and vaccine cards, and even a copy of our marriage license in case someone challenged the reality of our 50-plus years of respectability. I thought he was being silly, but I wasn't going to sneer at someone else's security blanket when I was lugging several months' worth of New Yorkers. 

When we got to the airport, though, we discovered that flying business class allowed us to prance past Economy's long, glacially slow check-in lines and step right up to one of the counters reserved for the plutocracy. Moreover, the woman checking us in was thrilled that Danny had all our information ready to hand on paper, and so was I when I watched a couple at the next counter trying vainly to locate their documents on a phone that didn't have quite enough signal. 

From there pretty much everything went as smoothly as I could have hoped. With several hours to kill, we strolled off to the mostly empty plutocrats' lounge for a free lunch and some time with the New Yorker food issue. At the gate, we boarded early and settled into our business-class pods with a glass of complimentary champagne. The dinner and, later, breakfast we were served were surprisingly tasty and the service couldn't have been nicer. And the lie-flat seats, though not anywhere near as comfortable as an actual bed, were a huge improvement over spending the night hunched over in Economy.

I should note that we wore N95 masks through all of this, aside from when we were eating and drinking, and that this was exceedingly unpleasant. You can tell those masks are really effective by how hot and uncomfortable they are, and trying to sleep while wearing one was an experience I don't look forward to repeating. But I am no anti-masker, and I was, if not exactly happy to mask up, certainly willing to do my part by wearing one. 

Masked up in Fidenza's central piazza.

When we arrived in Italy, our vaccination and test documents were accepted without problems, our taxi showed up only a few minutes late, and soon we were in Fidenza, sitting in the piazza with Pam and Romano and watching the sun go down as we sipped Negronis and nibbled on pizza. All the hassle seemed worth it. So did flying business class, even if next time we can't get a super-low fare. 

I do wonder, though, about all the data-gathering the pandemic has unleashed. Once the virus is finally defeated, will all these requirements become just a memory? Or will this be like 9/11, where the emergency of the moment morphs into a new normal that we all have no choice but to submit to? 

Now where were we?

When Danny and I left Italy in January 2020 we already had tickets to return in April. Of course that didn't happen. We settled into lockdown in California, anxiously reading reports about the devastating effects of COVID-19 on Italy's north, including our little corner of it. People kept asking me what was happening in Fidenza so I began blogging about what I was hearing from my Italian friends, ignoring my rule that "Quanto? Tanto!" is something I do only when I'm in Italy. 

But once it became clear that this was neither a short-term crisis nor one confined to Italy and other non-U.S. places, I abandoned my effort to chronicle Fidenza's pandemic woes from afar. I could offer neither first-hand observations nor any kind of expertise, and trying to fit dribs and drabs of information into some kind of narrative began to seem both pointless and deceptive. Or maybe I was just depressed, like everyone else.

Actually we've had a pretty good pandemic compared to most. We never got sick, we didn't have too much trouble getting vaccinated, and being retired empty-nesters we didn't have to worry about losing our jobs or homeschooling children. We'd even stocked up on toilet paper right before the lockdown commenced. And there are few better places to be under house arrest than the San Francisco Bay Area, with its excellent wifi, fabulous food, and vast network of beautiful parks.

We missed our Italian life, though, and the way being locked down seemed to accelerate the aging process had us wondering if we'd even be physically capable of  making the trip whenever the pandemic ended...if indeed it ever did.

So early this summer, when the surge of vaccinations in both California and Italy provoked a rush of giddy optimism in some of us, Danny and I bought round-trip tickets to Italy for early September. Surely by then life on both continents would be pretty much back to normal.

Alas, the Delta variant and its anti-mask, anti-vaxx, anti-"medical establishment" enablers have squelched that hope. But once we had our tickets in hand--and very  attractively priced business-class tickets, at that--giving up on returning to Fidenza seemed impossible. Our friends in Italy feared that the millions of Italians disporting themselves in vacation spots during August, plus the reopening of schools in September, would guarantee a surge in COVID cases and thence more lockdowns--lockdowns far more stringent than what we experienced in California. But we saw how well Italy's vaccination drive was going and how the number of cases in Fidenza had fallen to almost nothing, and we looked at the reassuring stats about breakthrough infections among the fully vaccinated, and we decided to go ahead. 

And so we are back in Italy, and thus far the risk seems well worth it. I'll let you know if that changes.

The view from our little balcony. I'm so happy to be here after almost 20 months away.