‘They called it a normal flu:’ How Covid-19 ravaged an Italian family

Francesca Pariboni’s ordeal started on March 30, when her cancer-stricken father started showing symptoms of Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus.

Since then, she has been battling with local health institutions which, by her account, seem ill-prepared for the key task of keeping tabs on suspected coronavirus cases.

“Basically, nobody paid attention to us,” she said of her early efforts to flag up her father’s condition to a Covid-19 help line, which involved waiting for at least 90 minutes to get through.

Operators “would answer superficially, as if there was nothing to worry about, they called it a normal flu and linked it to my father’s immunocompromised state,” the 29-year-old Roman lawyer told dpa.

Her father Paolo kept getting worse, and request for him to be tested for the novel coronavirus – even from their family doctor – went unheeded until April 6.

On that day, the family took him to hospital, after a pulse oximetre brought home by Francesca’s uncle showed that Paolo’s oxygen saturation levels had fallen dramatically.

“That was the last day I saw him,” Pariboni said. Her father died on April 19, aged 59. In February he had been diagnosed with a severe form of brain cancer.

“We know that he would have not survived his cancer, but he might have lived a few months more [had he been tested earlier],” Pariboni said.

Hospital doctors immediately diagnosed Paolo as a Covid-19 case, but even then, the rest of the family had to insist to get tested for the virus.

“My mother really had to argue on the phone with the hospital until she found a doctor who said ‘OK, come,” Pariboni said. She, her mother and her boyfriend all came out positive.

Pariboni and her boyfriend had no symptoms and were told to self-isolate at home, while her mother was hospitalized in the same room as her father. She stayed with him until the end, and has now recovered.

The uncle who helped detect how bad a state her father was in also caught the virus, but got confirmation only after checking into hospital after two weeks of isolation at home.

He previously tried to alert to the local health authority, but it took them 20 days to get back to him and offer a virus test.

Pariboni and her boyfriend remain confined at home, but another test on April 30 revealed that she is still positive while her partner has shaken off the virus.

But she said she got this response only after making repeated calls to one of several health officials that have contacted her in the past few weeks.

“Since I have been at home, five or six different people from the health authority have called from seven different numbers, and each time it seemed they had no file on me,” she said.

“I had to repeat all the same information: my email, my phone number, my address, details on who lives with me … total confusion,” she sighed.

She was advised to self isolate from her boyfriend, and told that due to the recent May Day bank holiday, she will only receive official test results on Monday or Tuesday.

Pariboni, who has vented her frustration on Facebook, said her experience shows “an organizational schizophrenia” in the health system’s response to the epidemic.

Italy is one of countries worst hit by the novel coronavirus, with nearly 29,000 deaths and more than 210,000 infections as of Sunday.

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It is due to start relaxing a nearly two-month lockdown on Monday, entering a phase in which health experts say the capacity to keep track of any new infections will be even more crucial.

“We’ll have to be ten times faster than what we have been so far in identifying and containing new clusters,” Giovanni Rezza, an epidemiologist from the National Health Institute, said last month. (dpa)