Pizza, gelato and the coronavirus in northern Italy

I'd spent the past 1425 days googling Trump. I didn't have an app for a specific newspaper or any particular site, I just typed "Trump" in the google bar and read whatever came up.  As the only American in a small town in Italy, asking me about Trump was simply irresistible for the townsfolk, so I always felt I should be somewhat prepared.  In the first couple of years their comments had been about Al Capone (pronounced Cah-POH-nay), but Trump quickly took his place. 

In January, Trump said something about the Chinese Coronavirus and the next day instead of typing "Trump" in the google bar I typed "Chinese Coronavirus".  I read about the hospitals being built in a week and saw videos of ghost towns taken by drones. I watched the number of cases and deaths increase and I saw photos of empty grocery stores. I never thought about Trump again.

The Chinese Coronavirus was my new obsession.  With it I also learned more about SARS (which I was apparently and embarrassingly too naive to worry about 17 years ago, and not because I was googling George W. Bush), the internet censorship in China and a website called Worldometers which had begun tracking the number of coronavirus cases by country. That's when I realized it was no longer necessary to type "Chinese" before "coronavirus". There were a lot of countries on the list, but fortunately, for several weeks, Italy was near the bottom.

People talked about how incredible it was that China had built those hospitals so quickly.  In Italy it takes years to do anything. And even if things get approved, it takes years more to actually see a building. People said that if the virus ever really spread in Italy, we would be doomed. Jokes flew freely because Italy's initial few cases and the cases in France and Germany had stopped increasing.       

On Friday afternoon, the 21st of February, we had four cases.  With my usual obsessive check before bed I know the number was higher, but I can't remember how much higher.  That night, it still wasn't alarming enough to count sheep.