Covid, the government has not yet learned to communicate with citizens

From the information that continues to confuse people, giving for certain dpcm still in the pipeline to the oppositions that in the courtroom joke about the fate of the country to the government that professes prudence but acts little: the lesson of spring did not help much

(Photo: Massimo Di Vita / Massimo Di Vita Archive / Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images) It is useless to comment on a dpcm and a decree law that are not there. The Italian media is repeating in October the same unforgivable mistakes made between the end of February and the beginning of March: commenting on (or worse still, taking for granted) the prescriptions included in the working drafts of the government measures. Updating titles and articles all the time. So since last week the country is again in the balance between the fear of new restrictive measures, the cryptic denials coming from the Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, the opinions of the usual polemics and little else concrete in hand.

A fairly indigestible theater that joins the one staged yesterday in Montecitorio, when the opposition chose an obscene political trip to the majority - to lack the quorum in the classroom on important communications from the Minister of Health - even in front of 45 Giallorossi deputies absent because they are positive or in fiduciary isolation. The problem is that the vote, postponed to today, would have concerned the legislative decree relating to the extension of the state of emergency to 31 January 2021. After that, the executive could have renewed or updated the containment and mitigation measures with a decree of the Prime Minister which was valid after October 15, the date of conclusion of the current state of emergency. In short, Lega and associates continue to joke with people's skin.

Obviously the misstep in the Chamber is also the responsibility of the junta for the Montecitorio regulation, therefore of the majority, where eight months after the outbreak of the epidemic no way out was thought of in case of high numbers of infected or otherwise unavailable parliamentarians cause Covid to present themselves in the classroom: that is, consider them as on a mission and therefore exclude them from the quorum for votes in the classroom, at least most of them. So it was finally decided, and today the vote will be repeated, racing against the technical times of publication in the Official Gazette.

The result is that we have essentially lost two weeks: one of chatter and negotiations, push and pull surreal like the one on Juventus-Napoli, sinister suggestions from abroad that we have re-chewed in the light of our situation (discreet but worsening), the other linked to yet another institutional superficiality. Two crucial weeks, in a phase like this, with a second wave to keep under control, the regions that proceed as usual in no particular order between sheriffs and lax, the information that raises bits of indiscretions re-chewed shortly after, increasing the confusion in the public opinion. Confusion which, among other things, turns into poor compliance with the measures.

In short, on the one hand and on the other it would seem that we have learned nothing, or almost nothing, from the three dark months between February and April . The government continually recommends caution but gets bogged down in Parliament and wastes time. Or maybe he takes it, to see how the contagion curve will evolve and, if anything, directly impose slightly more stringent rules, avoiding the TV series of last spring's weekly dpcm. Too bad that the virus does not wait and the delays that we are accumulating (for example on the swabs for those returning from certain countries, on the few daily tests that are still done, at least double it would be needed, on public transport transformed into kiosks, on the few checks and so on via) can be paid very dearly, as situations such as the French or British demonstrate.

The opposition continues to prove substantially nothing in terms of collaboration with the executive: responsibility does not exist, in the classroom there is a play obstruction on dl related to the pandemic. A Russian roulette with the fate of the country.

Information, finally, does not resist the call of clickbait, the easy and melodramatic title on the measures that distress our daily life and promise to return to influence it more than what it already isn't. Instead of waiting, explaining, possibly not giving news without a shred of certainty, we have been reading catastrophic headlines for days that allude to a new lockdown and keep millions of people on the grill condemning us to a continuous and psychologically stressful fibrillation. An attitude that we would have liked to forget in favor of a more reasonable, modulated and detailed approach. Nothing to do, we can't do it: the rhetoric of the lethal virus has returned to overwhelm every sense of proportion.