** Bergamo, the massacre that the employers did not want to avoid. **
The area of Italy most devastated by the Covid-19 is a large industrial centre. It was never declared a red zone due to pressure from business people. The cost in human lives has been catastrophic.
There are images that mark an era, that are engraved in the collective imagination of a country. The one that the Italians will not be able to forget in years to come is the one that the residents of Bergamo photographed from their windows on the night of March 18. Seventy military trucks crossed the city in the midst of a sepulchral silence, one after the other, in a slow march as a sign of respect: they were carrying corpses. They were taking them to other cities outside Lombardy because the cemetery, the morgue, the church converted into an emergency morgue and the crematorium operating 24 hours a day were no longer adequate. The image captured the magnitude of the ongoing tragedy in the area of Italy most affected by the coronavirus. The next day, the country was awakened by the news that it was the first in the world in official deaths from Covid-19, mostly in Lombardy. But why is the situation so dramatic precisely in Bergamo? What has happened in that area so that in March 2020 there were 400% more deaths than in the same month of the previous year?
On February 23rd, there were 2 positive cases of coronavirus in the province of Bergamo. In one week, they reached 220; almost all of them in Val Seriana. In Codogno, a town in Lombardy where the first official case of coronavirus was detected on 21 February, 50 diagnosed cases were enough to close the town and declare it a red zone. Why was the same not done in Val Seriana? Because this valley of the Serio River is home to one of the most important industrial centers in Italy, and the industrial employers put pressure on all institutions to avoid closing their factories and losing money. And so, incredible as it may seem, the area with the most deaths from coronavirus per inhabitant in Italy - and in Europe - has never been declared a red zone, despite the astonishment of the mayors who were calling for it, and of the citizens, who are now demanding responsibility. The general practitioners of Val Seriana are the first to speak out: if it had been declared a red zone, as all the experts advised, hundreds of people would have been saved, they say, powerless.
The story is even murkier: those who have an interest in keeping the factories open are, in some cases, the same as those who have an interest in the private clinics. Lombardy is the Italian region that most represents the model of commercialization of health care and has been the victim of a large-scale corrupt system led by the former governor for 18 years (from 1995 to 2013), Roberto Formigoni, a leading member of Communion and Liberation (CyL). He was from Berlusconi's party, who defined him as "governor for life of Lombardy", but he always had the support of the League, which has governed the region since Formigoni left, accused - and then convicted - of corruption in the health sector. His successor, Roberto Maroni, initiated a health reform in 2017 that cut back even further on public health investments and has practically abolished the figure of the family doctor, replacing him with the "manager". "It's true, in the next five years 45,000 family doctors will disappear, but who still goes to the family doctor," said the League's politician Giancarlo Giorgetti, then Deputy Secretary of State in the Conte-Salvini government, undaunted in August last year.
The epidemic in the Bergamo area, the so-called Bergamasca, officially started on the afternoon of Sunday 23 February, although the general practitioners - in the front line of denouncing the situation - said that they had been treating many cases of abnormal pneumonia in people as young as 40 since the end of December. On 23 February, the results of the coronavirus tests of two patients admitted to the Pesenti Fenaroli hospital in Alzano Lombardo, a town of 13,670 inhabitants a few kilometres from Bergamo, were positive. Since both had been in contact with other patients and with doctors and nurses, the management of the hospital decided to close the doors. But, without any explanation, they reopened them a few hours later, without disinfecting the facilities or isolating the patients with Covid-19. What is more, the medical staff spent a week working without protection; a good number of the hospital's nurses became infected and spread the virus among the population. The contagion multiplied throughout the valley. The hospital turned out to be the first major focus of infection: patients who were admitted for a simple hip problem ended up dying from coronavirus infection.
The mayors of the two most affected municipalities in the Val Seriana, Nembro and Alzano Lombardo, waited every day at seven in the evening for the order to close the town, which was what they had agreed to do. Everything was ready: the ordinances had been drafted, the army had been mobilized, the chief of police had informed them of the shifts to be taken in the guards, and the tents were set up. But the order never came, and no one could explain to them why. However, there were continuous calls from the businessmen and factory owners in the area, who were very concerned about avoiding the closure of their activities at all costs. They were not hiding.
Without any shame, on February 28th, in the middle of the Coronavirus emergency - in 5 days the 110 official infected people in the area had been reached, already out of control - the Italian industrial employers, Confindustria, started a network campaign with the hashtag #YesWeWork. "We have to lower the tone, make the public understand that the situation is becoming normal, that people can go back to living as before," said the president of Confindustria Lombardia, Marco Bonometti, in the media.
The same day, Confindustria Bergamo launched its own campaign aimed at foreign investors to convince them that nothing was happening there and that they were not going to close down. The slogan was unequivocal: "Bergamo non si ferma / Bergamo is running".
The message of the promotional video for the international partners was a nonsense: "Cases of Coronavirus have been diagnosed in Italy, but as in many other countries", they minimized. And they lied: "The risk of infection is low. They blamed the media for unjustified scaremongering, and while showing workers working in their factories they boasted that all the factories would remain "open and full, as usual.
Only five days later the huge outbreak of contagion and death broke out, which ended up being the largest in Italy and Europe. But even then they did not withdraw the campaign, much less consider closing the factories. Confindustria Bergamo groups 1,200 companies that employ more than 80,000 workers. All of them were exposed to the virus, forced to go to work, largely without adequate measures -sheltered, without safety distance or protective material-, putting themselves and their whole environment at risk.
The mayor of Bergamo, Giorgio Gori of the Democratic Party, had also joined in the clamour not to close the city and on 1 March he invited people to fill the shops in the centre with the slogan "Bergamo does not stop". Later, in the face of the evidence of the catastrophe, he regretted it and admitted that he had taken too soft a measure not to hinder the economic activity of the powerful companies in the area.
On March 8, official reports in the Bergamasca had gone from 220 to 997 in one week. In the afternoon it was leaked that the government wanted to isolate Lombardy. After hours of chaos in which many left Milan in a stampede, Giuseppe Conte appeared, already at dawn, in a confused press conference through Facebook to announce the decree. It was not what the mayors of the towns of the Val Seriana expected: no red zone, but orange. In other words, entry and exit to and from the municipalities were restricted, but everyone could still go to work.
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After two days, the confinement was extended to all of Italy equally. And nothing changed in the area of the Bergamasca, where the contagions grew and grew at the same unstoppable rate of their factories running at full speed. "When everyone in the area, especially in Nembro and Alzano Lombardo, took it for granted that the red zone was going to be declared, some important companies in the area lobbied to delay it as much as possible," says Andrea Agazzi, general secretary of the FIOM Bergamo trade union, in the RAI's Report. And he adds: "Confindustria played its cards and the government chose which side it was going to be on".
Infections and deaths increased unstoppably, especially in the industrial areas of Lombardy between Bergamo and Brescia. Exactly one month after the first official case of coronavirus in Italy, on Saturday 21 March, the sad record of almost 800 deaths a day was reached. The governors of Lombardy and Piedmont - another great industrial centre - declared that the situation was unsustainable and that it was necessary to stop production activity. Conte, who until then had been against the measure, appeared at night overwhelmed to say that yes, now yes, "all non-essential productive economic activities" would be closed.
Confindustria was immediately activated and began a pressure offensive against the government. "Not all non-essential activities can be shut down," they said in a letter to the premier detailing their demands. The industrialists managed to get the decree approved within 24 hours and Conte accepted its conditions. In effect, the Government had chosen whose side to be on, and not that of the workers.
The trade unions, en bloc, took to the warpath and threatened a general strike if the real closure of non-essential productive activities was not carried out. Confindustria had succeeded in adding many non-essential activities, such as those in the arms and munitions industry, to the list of activities that could continue to operate. In addition, they included a kind of clause that allowed, in practice, any company that declared that it was "functional" for an essential economic activity to remain open. This meant that in just one day, in Brescia, the other Lombardy province hit by the coronavirus, more than 600 companies that were not on the list of the essential ones began the procedures to continue operating.
"I do not understand why the unions would want to strike. The decree is already very restrictive: what more should be done," said Confindustria president Vincenzo Boccia, not very empathetic. He added: "We will already lose 100 billion euros a month; not stopping the economy is in the interest of the whole country. Annamaria Furlan, general secretary of the CISL union, tried to explain: "I have been a trade unionist for 40 years and I have never asked for the closure of any factory, but now people's lives are at risk.
The factory workers started protests and strikes while the unions negotiated with the government, which finally came to its senses. Some activities were removed from the list of the more than eighty considered essential, such as the arms industry or call-centers that sell unsolicited offers over the phone, and petrochemical industries were restricted. It was also agreed that the self-certification of a company was not sufficient to be considered functional for an essential one, and the commitment to protect the right to health of the workers who remain in the factories. However, ambiguous points were left in the decree and there is a grey area that allows many factories to remain open. Similarly, many workers continue to work without the proper safety distance or adequate equipment.
The Bergamasca factories remained practically all open until March 23, when the official count in the area was almost 6,500. A week later, on March 30, despite the decree closing "all non-essential production activities," there were 1,800 factories open and 8,670 officially infected in the area.
Let's name the factories that didn't want to close. One of the companies in the area is Tenaris, a world leader in the manufacture of pipes and services for oil and gas exploration and production, with a turnover of $7.3 billion and legal headquarters in Luxembourg. It employs 1,700 workers in its Bergamasca factory and belongs to the Rocca family, with Gianfelice Rocca, the eighth richest man in Italy, as its owner. In the province of Bergamo, as in the whole of Lombardy, private health care is very strong. In Bergamasca, in particular, half of the health services are private. The two most important private clinics in the area, which have an annual turnover of more than 15 million euros each, belong to the San Donato group -whose president is none other than the former Italian deputy prime minister Angelino Alfano, former Berlusconi's dauphin- and the Humanitas group. The president of Humanitas is Gianfelice Rocca, also owner of Tenaris, the industry that has not wanted to send its workers home. Bergamo's private healthcare system was not activated by the Coronavirus emergency until March 8, when, by decree, all non-urgent services had to be postponed. Only then did they start making room for Covid-19 patients.
Brembo is another big company with factories in the Bergamasca. It belongs to the powerful Bombassei family, also involved in politics: Alberto, the son of the founder, was a member of parliament for Scelta Civica, the party of Mario Monti. He has 3,000 workers in his factories in the Bergamo area, where they produce brakes for cars. It has a turnover of 2.6 billion euros. They didn't want to close.
Val Seriana was largely industrialised by Swiss companies over 100 years ago, so the presence of factories linked to Switzerland is still important. Another big company that has more than 6,000 workers in Italy, more than 850 in the Bergamasca, is ABB, with Swiss and Swedish capital. Leader in robotics, it has a turnover of 2 billion euros. On March 30th it was still open as usual.
Persico, an Italian company that produces automotive components, with 400 workers and 159 million in sales, is based in Nembro, the municipality with the highest number of deaths from Covid-19 per inhabitant in Italy. Pierino Persico, the owner, was one of those who most opposed the declaration of the red zone.
In Nembro, 14 people died in March 2019. In the same month this year there were 123 (a 750% increase). In Alzano Lombardo, in March 2019, 9 people died; this March, 101. In the city of Bergamo (120,000 inhabitants), 553 died in March, while in March 2019, 125 died. According to a study published by the Giornale di Brescia, in this Lombard province the number of infected people would be 20 times higher than the official figure, 15% of the population. And the same goes for the dead. According to this study, they would be twice as many as the official ones, that is, 3,000 in the province of Brescia alone. The lack of tests - on the living and the dead - makes it impossible to carry out a reliable count. What we do know is that Italy is the country in the world with the most deaths from Covid-19, around 18,000, and the majority are from the industrial north.
Now, faced with thousands of dead bodies and a population that is beginning to turn its grief into anger, everyone is shaking off the blame. The governor of Lombardy, leghista Attilio Fontana, blames the central government and claims that he was not stricter because they did not let him. In fact, if he had wanted to he could have been, as were the governors of Emilia Romagna, Lazio and Campania, who decreed red zones in their regions. The truth is that no authority has been up to the task, except the mayors of the small towns, who are the only ones who have recognised - and publicly denounced - the pressure from the industrialists, who were besieging them with calls to try to prevent or postpone the closure of the factories. From a wounded Bergamo and still in shock, the citizens are beginning to organise themselves to ask for the facts to be clarified and for someone to at least assume responsibility for having allowed economic interests to take precedence over the health - that is, the life - of the workers of Bergamasca. Many of them, incidentally, are precarious.
AUTHOR
Alba Sidera
** Original in Spanish posted at : https://ctxt.es/es/20200401/Politica/31884/Alba-Sidera-Italia-coronavirus-lombardia-patronal-economia-muertes.htm
** English Translation, courtesy of Willem Niehorster, posted on Facebook at : https://www.facebook.com/willem.niehorster.7/posts/10157376613782400
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