I'll win at dawn

A shield to win: vaccines. It's hard, it's better, but it's not over. Still restrictions, limited, but necessary. The infections have reached levels that with over 85% of people vaccinated, we would never have imagined. However, compared to a year ago, when the infections were around 40 thousand and the deaths were an average of 600 per day, we are doing much better. This means that vaccines have done and are playing their part.
I will not enter - because it would be useless - in the controversies for or against vaccines, green passes, children and more. I limit myself to examining the reliable data and results of science.

And so I say, on the notes of Giacomo Puccini, that "at dawn I will win", indeed we will win, we are already winning.
Together (almost all) we found the strength to turn the page and we lived a simple but more peaceful Christmas. Simple as all those who in recent months have spent energy and time for others: doctors and nurses in hospitals (first "saints immediately" then often reported), volunteers who have made vaccination centers functional, brought food and a smile to those who were (and still are) in quarantine, the mayors who made the "machine" work anyway, the teachers for the dad, the boys for accepting the obligation not to go out, such as the curfew in the wars that we , fortunately we have not seen.

It was long, tiring, incredibly heavy, but we are here to tell it and we thank God. The biggest pandemic in recent history since the time of the Spanish woman is passing (but the backlash will still be challenging): never seen such deserted streets, bars, restaurants, shops closed. Our villages and hamlets looked like lunar landscapes and they were. Never seen planes on the ground, buses stopped and everyone running around with the "pass". No, it's not over, but the worst is over.
It was a check-up for everything: the head, the heart, the hands. A test of maturity that has certainly sown effects that are not yet completely clear: tastes, customs, schedules, lifestyles, body and soul gestures have changed. We will then see how.

It is a new beginning for all of us, in a certain sense survivors of a pandemic, which have fallen upon us, we do not yet know how, which has caught us absolutely unprepared. It is a restart that rekindles hope and illuminates the smiles of our children and grandchildren.
The rest, I believe, is once again being done by the genius and imagination of the Italians, restarting a frozen economy. After all, when it is over (the pandemic not Covid which, perhaps, we will carry along with us for a long time like so many other diseases blocked by vaccines), there will be another post-war period.
We arrived at that with the patches on the backside, the coats and the clothes turned inside out; to the next we land devastated inside, but I am sure that, once again, we will find the same strength as then to "turn the page".

Gian Mario Ricciardi
NP January 2022