In Rome, the first signs of change came from overhead. Shortly before cocktail hour on Monday last week, the thrum-thrum-thrum of a helicopter could be heard above the winding lanes of the 2,000-year-old historic center. The police were keeping an eye on the Trastevere neighborhood, where smoke billowed from the windows of a jail as inmates rioted, protesting cramped conditions that put them at risk of coronavirus infection.
About the same time, the stock market was opening in New York, ushering in a week that would become the worst rout in more than three decades. A few hours later, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte gathered journalists for a televised, prime-time press conference.
Rules that only 48 hours earlier had been imposed on Milan, Venice and other cities in the north — travel was restricted, schools were shut and even the opera was called off — would be extended nationwide.
Illustration: Yusha
The world’s eighth-biggest economy, with more than 60 million inhabitants, entered virtual quarantine.
It was like flicking a switch. In just days, a Western democracy went from Aperol Spritz to lockdown, as the outbreak spread from a northern crisis to a national one, now with more than 24,747 known infections and more than 1,809 deaths [as of yesterday], second only to China.
For those lucky enough not to be living through the Italian lockdown, pay attention: What is happening in Milan, Florence and Rome offers a likely preview of what is coming to New York, London or Paris in a week or two.
Consider this our letter to you from Italy, written from the seclusion of our couches and dining room tables, with a taste of what you should expect.
Whether it is shuttered shops, civil unrest, or the coronavirus itself, it will be difficult to avoid the trauma Italy has experienced in the past three weeks.
US President Donald Trump blamed the outbreak on a “foreign” virus when he announced restrictions on European travel to the US, but it is already there, in Seattle, New Rochelle and places yet undetected.
The Italian prime minister took to Twitter with the hashtag #iorestoacasa: “I stay at home.”
While hunkering down in your kitchen or bedroom makes epidemiological sense, it is terrible for bars, boutiques and pizzerias.
On Tuesday evening last week, as the streetlights flickered on, a flour-dusted pizzaiolo exited a restaurant near Piazza Navona while his boss taped signs on the window declaring the place shuttered.
“‘Stay at home,’ they said!” the pizza maker railed. “Well, now we’re going to stay at home. We’re closed.”
Similar scenes are playing out from Italy’s boot-top to toe. Northern hospitals are approaching the limits of their ability to care for those whose lungs are being ravaged by the disease.
The Rialto Bridge in Venice, normally teeming with selfie-stick-wielding tourists, is empty.
Dolomiti Superski, Europe’s biggest ski resort, has shut its lifts for the season despite pistes buried under more than 1.5m of snow.
In Naples, trucks that look like something out of Blade Runner trundle through the Piazza del Plebiscito dousing the cobblestones in disinfectant.
The unfolding financial crisis is deeply entwined with what is happening in shoe stores, gelato shops and hospital wards. Unlike the last financial contagion, which largely came from within the banking system, this is a shock to the entire economic corpus.
As business grinds to a halt, the country risks a domino effect of unpaid bills and loans that threaten to ripple across the globe.
“Basically, it’s a natural-disaster case,” Philipp Hildebrand, vice chairman at money manager BlackRock, told Bloomberg TV. “If they don’t have customers for a couple of weeks, it becomes very hard to service their debt, it becomes hard to pay the rent.”
Italy on Wednesday announced measures worth as much as 25 billion euros (US$27.97 billion) to cushion the blow of the pandemic.
Those include help for companies whose turnover has plunged, a moratorium on some mortgage payments and support for workers facing temporary layoffs and parents who must stay home to take care of kids when schools are closed.
On Thursday, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde unveiled her own stimulus package, but held off on cutting interest rates.
When Lagarde said: “We are not here to close spreads,” the Italian bond market plunged and yields shot up by the most ever.
By the end of the day, US stocks had registered their worst sell-off since 1987’s Black Monday.
Hildebrand’s comparison to a natural disaster is apt. This is not like a sovereign-debt crisis, a credit crunch, or even the invasion of Iraq. The only thing that comes close is the apprehension before a hurricane.
As anyone who has spent much time in Florida can attest, you know it is coming, but you do not know exactly when or where it will hit or how bad it will be.
So you lay in supplies and make sure your Netflix subscription is paid up, and when it hits you do not go outside because you might get killed by flying debris.
That is what Italy feels like.
In a televised address on Wednesday evening, Conte tightened things even further, ordering virtually all retailers other than grocery stores, pharmacies and gas stations to close until Wednesday next week.
Factories can operate and public transportation, banks and the postal service would continue, but restaurants, cafes and bars are shut.
With each passing day, Italy has become increasingly isolated from the outside world. Neighbors have clamped down at border crossings that for the past two decades have allowed unfettered passage under EU rules.
Austria and Slovenia are restricting entry to those who have tested negative for the virus, and Switzerland has sealed off nine minor crossings. On Thursday, Italians awoke to the news of Trump’s ban on most travel from Europe.
No matter what form the landfall takes — from financial to epidemiological — the Italian experience has made one thing clear: When those shocks happen, it will seem like they arrived overnight.
As recently as March 6, the tourists had largely cleared out of Rome, but for locals life went on, with gusto. Restaurants were so packed that waiters could barely squeeze past the diners. Shoppers jostled for warm pizza Bianca in bakeries.
A butcher on Campo de’Fiori was so crowded customers needed to take a number.
Then in the wee hours from March 7 to 8, Conte announced the northern restrictions, and on March 9 Italy became the first democratic country since World War II to impose a nationwide lockdown.
Three weeks ago it had seemed like a big deal when cases topped 1,000. Now that number seems quaint.
The outbreak that started in China in late January has infected more than 169,000 people in at least 114 countries and territories, shuttering cities, disrupting trade and supply chains, and shaking financial markets.
With Europe facing the prospect of a recession, Italy is at the center of it all. The country’s public debt stands at about 2.4 trillion euros, almost 135 percent of GDP.
Banks in other EU countries hold almost 450 billion euros in Italian sovereign debt. If the country goes under and those Italian holdings collapse in value, it would shake the foundations of the EU banking system.
European banks are worried the crisis could even turn into a global meltdown like 2008.
Their concern is that a virus-induced shutdown could spark a wave of defaults among the small and medium-sized enterprises that make up the economic backbone of countries such as Italy and Germany.
That would wipe out profits at the lenders and potentially eat up much of the capital that regulators require them to set aside for a rainy day.
The beleaguered Italian economy was already vulnerable to the economic impact of the virus, “a bit like an immuno-compromised patient,” said Rosamaria Bitetti, an economist at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome.
And like that patient, a sneezing, sniffling Italy puts the rest of the world at risk.
“The impact could be systemic for all of Europe and beyond,” Bitetti said.
It is a peril that starts with people like Rossella Rocco. After eight years studying and working in Rome, in December last year the 29-year-old hairdresser moved back home to Corigliano-Rossano, a town of 77,000 in the southern region of Calabria.
With state funding offered to young entrepreneurs launching businesses in the south, she leased a shop on the central piazza that she outfitted with a pair of hair-washing sinks and three salon chairs.
Now, just a month before her planned opening, the pandemic has hit, with the town getting its first cases in the past few days. Even if customers show up, under the latest decree she will be barred from letting them in.
She compares the experience to awaiting a tidal wave.
“We’re bracing for impact: If people don’t leave the house there’s no business,” Rocco said. “I’m trying to stay positive, but this is devastating. Businesses like mine can’t survive without people.”
Italy offers key lessons for the rest of the world: Impose harsh rules, fast, and make sure your message is clear.
For weeks, Conte resisted demands from his government and opposition leaders for strict containment measures. Then he abruptly made his dramatic leap from locking down the north to shutting the entire country.
Media leaks of the first decision, to seal off the north, sparked confusion — even panic — prompting thousands to rush onto trains to escape, and leading southern regions to order quarantines for arrivals from the worst-hit areas.
Some economists say Italy’s early outbreak could prove that taking a short-term hit to business is worth the cost to stem the human and financial carnage.
“Italy is a precursor of what will happen in the US and in Europe because of the speed at which the virus spread,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of the International Affairs Institute in Rome. “Germany is on the same trend as Italy, but two weeks behind.”
In another preview of what the US might face, the extensive powers wielded by Italian regions — including health policy — led to delays in responding to the outbreak and arguments over limits on travel.
Most Europeans bristle at restrictions on the scale of those imposed in China.
“Italy’s weakness is the price to pay for an open society in a liberal democracy,” said Giovanni Orsina, head of the LUISS School of Government.
Beyond the financial risks, there are those that can be truly terrifying to anyone anywhere: violence and disease.
The turmoil in Trastevere was not unique. Prisoners in at least two dozen facilities across the country rioted, leaving 12 inmates dead, apparently from drug overdoses after raiding the jail pharmacies.
Yet so far, Italian officials insist there is little risk of civil unrest or of the government falling because of the emergency.
Of course, any prediction is hard to make given that infections have not yet peaked. Just a week ago, skiers were still booking Italian vacations and American university students were jetting around Europe.
The nightmare scenario is health facilities collapsing in northern Italy, where hospitals are expecting shortages of intensive-care beds, ventilation machines and respirators.
A rapid spread of the virus through the poorer south could expose the weak link in the national health system: An Italian Ministry of Health study said care in some southern regions is sub-standard.
This is where a now-famous graph called “flattening the curve” comes in. The chart circulating on social media, which illustrates the thinking behind Italy’s extraordinary measures, shows two scenarios for any country, region or city.
In one, cases spike all at once. In the second—represented by a flatter curve on a graph — the same number of infections spreads out over time due to “social distancing” such as school closures.
A horizontal line represents the number of cases the local healthcare system can handle at any given time. The flatter curve stays below the line, but the spike scenario goes above it — meaning there are not enough beds or respirators for patients who need them.
That is what Italy is trying to avoid.
For now, the hotspots in the north appear to be holding just below the line, in part by bringing in new equipment and, in recent days, moving intensive-care patients with non-corona ailments to hospitals farther away.
However, Italians are bracing for difficult decisions: On March 6, the national society of anesthesiology and intensive care published recommendations for dealing with “exceptional conditions of imbalance between needs and available resources” in admissions.
The considerations for potential triage include a patient’s age and chance of survival.
It is no wonder that some Italians, especially older ones, are gripped with fear.
On a recent morning at a Rome supermarket, a woman who appeared to be in her 70s blew up — more in terror than anger — at a man of a similar age standing close behind her, in violation of a new rule requiring at least 1 meter between people in public spaces.
Taxi drivers wearing both masks and scarves around their faces are balancing the risk of infection with making their car payments.
That fear has led to a sudden boom in grocery delivery services. The day after Conte announced the national lockdown, Rome supermarket entrances were jammed with bicycle couriers, mostly immigrants from Africa and South America, jostling for orders.
By then Milan had settled into a home-delivery routine that has left residents waiting more than a week for a slot to get groceries.
For Italians, it is just another sign that the entrenched rhythms of daily life had to give way — from cappuccino at the bar in the morning, to an aperitivo in the piazza after work, to a pizza out with friends at night.
The sacrifice is not fun, and borders on tragic: Weddings and funerals are banned, birthday parties postponed, educations derailed, businesses pushed to failure.
However, our friendly advice is when this virus gets to you, the sooner you accept the need to go into lockdown, the better.
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers
Gogoro Inc was once a rising star and a would-be unicorn in the years prior to its debut on the NASDAQ in 2022, as its environmentally friendly technology and stylish design attracted local young people. The electric scooter and battery swapping services provider is bracing for a major personnel shakeup following the abrupt resignation on Friday of founding chairman Horace Luke (陸學森) as chief executive officer. Luke’s departure indicates that Gogoro is sinking into the trough of unicorn disillusionment, with the company grappling with poor financial performance amid a slowdown in demand at home and setbacks in overseas expansions. About 95
RSS