These are not easy days. The forced quarantine we are subjected to is putting a strain on the whole country, both from a human and economic point of view: the health emergency of the Coronavirus it has revealed itself in all its gravity, leading the government to take drastic but necessary measures in a way that nobody, until a few weeks ago, expected.
And yet, very far from us, in China, this whole situation had already been experienced. Wuhan has long been at the center of the world's news, as the main outbreak of an epidemic that we saw far and remote and that instead we are now living directly on our skin. The Chinese government has taken drastic measures to stop the infection and now it seems that the situation is being resolved: but how has the infection been managed in the country? The much discussed Wuhan model is it also applicable to our reality?
What happened
The January 23 for many it became the date symbol of the Coronavirus epidemic in China: at that moment the government decided to quarantine the city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the infection, and the whole province of Hubei. 60 million Chinese have been "locked in" with a total blockade of all businesses. The images of the deserted city have gone around the world, showing how much the virus was no longer to be taken under his belt as previously thought. Yet the first signs had come over a month earlier, when an ophthalmologist had identified a virus never seen before in seven people.
A virus immediately recognized as very dangerous, capable of spreading with great speed and which immediately alerted the entire structure. We were at the end of 2019 and something, unfortunately, went very wrong in managing the situation: the Chinese government, in fact, began to censor as much as possible all the rumors that were beginning to arise on the epidemic, eliminating all traces from social and internet searches and trying to " contain "any kind of information about it.
Late admission
This media obscurantism has essentially made it much more difficult to deal with contagion. The scientific and political world has remained in the dark for too long, finding itself, when it was too late, with a contagion that has already taken place and a phenomenon that has become something far more globally widespread. When China "admitted" the presence of the new virus it was already too late, with an out of control situation in Wuhan and all over the country: many people, about 5 million, had already moved out of the city, spreading the virus on a scale now impossible to manage except through a series of stringent rules to avoid further infections and deaths.
Here the much-discussed "Wuhan model" came to life, the city was closed outside, the controls became stringent and suffocating, the rules impossible to violate and numerous other cities were involved in a sort of large red area controlled by the government.
Lights and shadows
It must be said, this forced isolation has certainly paid off. As Coronavirus has begun to show its terrible shape in the rest of the world, China has had its first positive results. The healed have started to leave hospitals and the number of infections has fallen dramatically, albeit with a terrible cost of 2404 dead, and the President's visit to the city for the first time Xi Jinping sanctioned the beginning of a slow return to normal for Wuhan.
The virus was therefore contained, still not defeated, but still with a strong reduction in its danger. But what was the cost for the inhabitants of the country? Citizens have experienced a series of stringent measures on their own skin which they have had to accept, partly necessary for the extent of the epidemic but due to a double, huge and very serious error of the Government.
Not only was the epidemic underestimated, despite clear signs of danger, but it was decided to hide it from the Chinese first and then from the world. When everything fell apart and we could no longer do without it, we started talking about it and ran for cover, in ways that were at least questionable in terms of form and communication.
The chains of government
From the outset, the measures taken by the government have been far more stringent than ours. Economic and social activities were immediately stopped: Wuhan was closed in a sort of bubble with blocked airports and transport, schools, factories and closed offices. Not only external movements but also internal ones were hindered. Right from the start there was no mention of "appeals" or "invitations", but of real ones ordersunder penalty of imprisonment in prison. From one day to the next, the country found itself in an emergency and, without much discussion, was forced to undergo these rules on its own skin.
The football championship has been frozen by the government itself, without much discussion on the part of the sports authorities and clubs involved; citizens have been forced to stay at all times; the expense was immediately made with online orders, with deliveries managed by the authorities and brought to the doors of the various residential areas, to avoid any type of contact.
Measures that have led to a marked improvement in the situation with the city which, in recent days, is slowly returning to normal. A large number of people are still in precautionary quarantine but Wuhan it is no longer as deserted as a few months ago, since, albeit with many precautions, it has been "reopened to the world".
The basic principles
The results and success of these practices are incontrovertible and in the light of the sun, with the epidemic successfully contained and a crisis now being resolved. If we were to evaluate the Chinese model only on the success of the same could we not fail to consider it as positive: thinking about it, in any case, the basic principles are reasonable and more than right to contain the infection. Avoiding human contacts as much as possible, gatherings, closing meeting places are the best moves to prevent a virus that is still little known from spreading.
These principles were also those that our country, albeit with a less steady hand, decided to implement. In this China, albeit with guilty delay, has seen us right: to date isolating people is perhaps the only way to contain the spread and not overload the health system.
Yet the ways in which restrictions have been implemented on Chinese soil are very different from our democratic feeling. A compulsory constraint and a very tight state control vest which, even in an emergency, should never be used as the only solution for solving the problem.
Resoluteness and discontent
Beijing, with a firm and rigid punch, stopped everything, it did it quickly, without the policy of small steps that we saw from us, but it did after seeing itself with its back against the wall, with the infections at the highest level and themedia obscurantism dramatically come to light. The hard punch is the only one that a socialist republic with a single large party in government conceives and is what has been implemented, however combined with a total confidence in its means: the survival of the economic fabric was guaranteed immediately, with the state that has committed itself to supporting the economic recovery in every way.
A hard punch which is however having an enormous economic cost and which has created some discontent among the population, imprisoned at home and forced to give up their entire lives overnight. Hence one tight propaganda to erase government errors, eliminate people's discontent from the media, repress it and rewrite the narrative by depicting the party and its president as the saviors of the homeland, those who, without error, saved China from the health disaster. But, as we have seen, there have been mistakes, all right.
Preventive censorship
To suppress errors and discontent, censorship was the weapon most adopted by the government. Not only all the information on Coronavirus they were eliminated before the epidemic exploded but also during the quarantine all the voices that did not agree with the narration wanted by the government were censored and eliminated. The New York Times conducted a study on all the materials hidden under the carpet by the Chinese government and dramatically surfaced: desperate people, on the verge of a nervous breakdown for total control and forced confinement, endless queues inside and outside hospitals, supermarkets completely empty, people carried away from home by force.
The government has not only hidden all this, but has also established an even more stringent sort of police state than usual with a very tight technological control. Smartphones and telephone company data were used for to monitor the movements of citizens, the authorities equipped with cutting-edge systems to recognize citizens and measure body temperature remotely, cameras turned on day and night to monitor every movement, with all the problems of violation of privacy that this entails.
Measures that China deemed necessary: in order to deal with the emergency, it was necessary to overshadow the individual freedoms, in a way that makes us discuss and that could never be applied in such proportions with us.
The Italy model
The Wuhan model certainly worked but it is clear that it was not perfect, neither in the times nor in the modalities. It has shown a fundamental assumption to the world: with isolation and caution the virus can be fought and the health emergency can be brought back on track. Sacrificing today means being well tomorrow and respecting the rules is an incontrovertible necessity for all of us. To be wrong were, from the beginning, the ways in which these restrictions were applied on Chinese soil, restrictions that are ill-suited to a parliamentary democracy like ours, where individual freedoms should always be in the first place and never repressed.
We live in an emergency and are forced to give up, but it is still about exceptional conditions by their nature and therefore temporary. The Wuhan model, as it was applied in China, could hardly work in our country, precisely because it would negate many of the basic principles on which our Republic has always been founded.
For this reason, albeit with all the problems we see these days, adapting the rules imposed by China to the Italian context was the right choice. The rest is up to us, ours civic sense, respect for the community in which we live. The hard punch of a state should never go beyond certain limits but we also have a duty to respect what we are told, to understand the gravity and extraordinary nature of the situation. Only in this way will we be able to return to the normality.
