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Life in the Time of Covid-19
The government has shut down schools in all of Italy. Cinemas and restaurants are closed. Normally busy streets are magically emptied of cars, parking lots outside schools are as bare as shaven armpits. Pollution levels are unusually low. It looks like the height of the summer holidays, or a scene from 28 Days Later.
At least those days I always get to work on time.
My little brother has developed a bad cough and a fever the past week: he has not been tested for Covid-19 - there are not enough swab tests for everyone - but the doctor urged him to self-isolate. We have a rather large house, and this hasn’t been a problem: my parents confined him in the attic, like the loony wife in a Gothic novel. To be fair, it’s working out pretty nice for him: he has an Internet connection, Netflix and three warm meals a day, delivered upstairs by my mother on a tray. She brings the tray upstairs, bangs cheerfully at his door, yells “Hey, leper, I brought dinner” and leaves the tray on the landing. I told my brother he could lower a bucket from the window and we could fill it with food for him, but so far my brilliant idea has been ignored.
Sometimes he asks me — via text — to bring him some object or the other — a fresh towel, toilet paper, a pen. His requests are getting more and more peculiar each passing day, though: yesterday he asked me for a glass…
