The pandemic in the memories of Gori and Vigevani in the lanes of the Sacco in Milan after the landing of the first case. Story of a catastrophe that narrowly escaped: “The challenge won with bare hands”
For many of them it was the first time that they had first-hand experience of what they had studied in books. Because if you choose to specialize in infectious diseases you have decided to chase viruses. To live with the cumbersome charm of a film whose ending you don’t know.
For the first time, there was no need to travel to Latin America or Africa: the enemy was knocking on the doors of the house.
Another bad joke of globalization: not people travel, but also diseases.
On March 17, 2003, the first global threat of the 21st century materializes. It was a Monday. The first suspected case of Sars landed in Milan from China. He passed by the house. Then after feeling ill he was hospitalized. Breathless. Pneumonia. Respiratory insufficiency. At the Sacco hospital in Milan they have just attended the WHO press conference, which for the first time in its history has raised a global alarm, recommending that travel from and to the affected areas be postponed.
Andrew Gori (now head of infectious diseases) is a young assistant in the corridors of the Sacco hospital in Milan. He had been working on tuberculosis and the disasters that HIV had been making for about twenty years. That night was the first time he wore one high containment suit. With separate paths. Now that Covid is a bad postcard that has arrived everywhere, we know the meaning of certain words.
It’s almost midnight in the meeting room, everyone is there. You rehearse how to wear overalls. Those who had taken courses explained the technique. Exercises, while catastrophe knocks outside. Data on mortality caused by Sars they know them by heart.
There are those who fear a disaster like the one generated by the Spanish flu. 10, or a little less, of those infected die. «It was the first time that we really measured ourselves with a pandemic emergency. The first time we have opened a direct exchange with the other hospitals in Italy ».
Here, the first time. Sars was this: an unannounced cyclone that could take everything away. But he was stopped in time. It means that everything he’s arguing about today about the faults and shortcomings of managing the Covid pandemic wasn’t even there.
“What brought the castle down was the volume. But we had the footprint, we knew what to do. In 2003, the fuse exploded in our hands and there were no diagnostic tools», explains Gori. The tampons that caused science to quarrel and forced rivers of people into eternal queues outside the pharmacy weren’t there at all. We worked with airports. From the Sacco and from the other hospitals he left with the briefcase. «The only tool was the thermometer. We measured the fever of those who disembarked. Then we organized the tracking of people ».
In that meeting room there was a discussion above all about who was to come into contact with the sick person. It means being exposed, quarantined. The older doctors offered themselves. They accepted coexistence with the first bubbles. Gian Marco Vigevani, now 82 years old, was the head of that department. «There was also to live with psychosis: I decided to set up a switchboard to respond to people’s fears. It was a cell phone that I answered in turn with my doctors. Those were also the days of the Iraq war. The newspapers had something to write about. «I remember that when the war ended, media attention also shifted to SARS. I wasn’t answering hundreds of calls every day from reporters. They told me I wanted to hide something: I just didn’t have time.”
Vigevani is moved. He still cries thinking back to the efforts of those days: «There were no more shifts: everyone wanted to be in the ward. It was the impetus to challenge the unknown». The fixed thoughts of the sanitary workers were also of Carlo Urbani, the doctor who discovered Sars. That he fought it with his bare hands. Which convinced the WHO to sound the alarm. To impose quarantines. And he died demonstrating, after being infected on a flight to Bangkok, that this virus was a beast that did not accept compromises and had to be stopped before it threw everything down. The virus killed him on March 29, 2003. He donated his lung tissue to research. That day began a long journey that reaches Wuhan. Then in Codogno. To the Val Seriana. In the world. “Sars was the virus that changed collective perception by dictating future rules,” concludes Gori. Which would then be those rules on which, almost 7 million deaths later, politicians and virologists are still divided, arguing. Seen 20 years later, that March 17, 2003, it was the long night before a storm only postponed in time.
March 16, 2023 (change March 16, 2023 | 1:02 pm)
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