Italy’s nursing homes emerge from COVID tunnel

ALZANO LOMBARDO, Italy Their last hug was through plastic.

Palmiro “Mario” Tami knew this was the day he was getting his second coronavirus vaccine shot. But with the northern Italian region of Lombardy again under lockdown, he did not know it would be accompanied by a visit from his wife of 58 years. Nor that he would be able, at last, to touch her hand.

“Franca? Is that you?” Tami, 82, exclaimed as he peered through the window of the nursing home rec room at a figure wrapped in a hospital gown, coiffed hair covered by green surgical netting and face obscured by a surgical mask.

Still, through the glass, her bright blue eyes shone through.

His wife, Franca Persico, held a red rose she had brought for him. Tami reached inside his canvas pouch for a tiny statuette of a girl for her. “I won it at Bingo,” Tami said with delight.

The Martino Zanchi Foundation Nursing Home has been closed to visitors for most of the month, as Italy’s pandemic epicenter of Lombardy plunged again into a near-total lockdown. Tami and his wife last saw each other in person on Feb. 24, Tami’s birthday. They were able to embrace through a hug tunnel, an inflatable plastic structure that permitted residents to safely hug loved ones. Even that muffled touch had been denied since August.

The final jab for the first onethird of the nursing home’s 94 residents this week marked the beginning of the end of a yearlong struggle to protect its fragile wards.

Nursing homes like the Martino Zanchi Foundation suffered the brunt of Italy’s first wave, claiming at least one-third of Italy’s official virus victims. Many more were not tested or counted as they died.

Nursing home director Maria Giulia Madaschi estimates that three-quarters of the 21 people who died in her care in March and April 2020 had COVID-19, which ravaged the valley next to Bergamo, spreading from Alzano Lombardo’s hospital nearby. But the system was too taxed to test nursing home residents and those deaths never figured into Italy’s death toll.