Life in the Time of Coronavirus

Here’s why we should be taking it seriously!

 

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When the Italian media began reporting on the increased community spread of the novel #coronavirus across the country, filmmaker Olmo Parenti, like many Italian citizens, didn’t take the threat of the pandemic too seriously. “My friends and I were almost mocking the few people who believed the issue was serious from the get-go,” Parenti said. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Just days later, Parenti felt like he was living in a different version of reality—a dystopian one. The number of positive cases had spiked dramatically. The entire county had shut down. The economy took a nosedive. Hospitals, overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, were being forced to make impossible utilitarian decisions: Which critical patients would receive lifesaving artificial ventilation, while the others would effectively be left to die? ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Parenti and his friends realized they were wrong and decided, “we had to redeem ourselves in some way.” Together with other members of his filmmaking collective, he put out a call for citizens across the country to film themselves in quarantine. “We asked them to talk in first person to the camera,” he said, “and give themselves advice based on their own past behavior.” ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ It turned into this short film, “10 Days,” which is the number of days many experts believe that the United States, England, and France are behind in the level of severity of the pandemic in Italy. 🎥 : Olmo Parenti (@athingby)

A post shared by The Atlantic (@theatlantic) on Mar 16, 2020 at 3:03pm PDT

https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/608113/italy-coronavirus/