Coronavirus: Italy races to get support to homeless after lockdown ‘apocalypse’

With a third of the global population told to stay at home under a coronavirus lockdown, Marco is among those who found themselves locked outside.

Italy was the first European country to shutter most of its businesses to contain the spread of the disease, plunging into an eerie silence on 9 March. As a result, an estimated 50,000 homeless people saw their support networks disappear behind closed doors.

Life on the streets of Milan, Italy’s richest city, has aged Marco beyond his 62 years. When asked how his life changed when the bustling city came to a standstill, he shrugs his shoulders. “On the street you’re always alone,” he tells The Independent. After a thoughtful pause, he then concedes that his “friends” – as he calls an array of benefactors – had all disappeared from one day to the next.

With the deadly virus ravaging the industrial north and an economic crisis looming, authorities have been confronted with a two-fold task: avoiding contagion at the same time as protecting the needy, and broadening the response in order to assist a swath of the population who are about to fall below the poverty line.

As the coronavirus began to grip Milan, Marco was sheltered far into the city’s southern suburbs at the “Saponaro” complex, which he describes as “the apocalypse”. The bed bugs, inedible food and occasional riots were compounded by the fear of a new invisible enemy spreading in the overcrowded structure. “At first, we didn’t realise what [coronavirus] was… we never would have imagined it would have reached this proportion,” he says.

Milan and its province recorded a cumulative 9,522 cases on Thursday, with the Lombardy region – of which it is the capital – accounting for about one-third of Italy’s total 83,049 active cases. According to Gabriele Rabaiotti, head of the municipal welfare department, when coronavirus swept the city it was clear that, from a social welfare perspective, “we had to change our whole ball game”.

For instance, Casa Jannacci, a shelter accommodating about 500 guests – making it the largest in Europe – went from being “a point of pride to being a liability”. “The operators and the guests found themselves on the same level; they all had to protect one another,” Rabaiotti tells The Independent.

What the local authorities dreaded, Rabaiotti explains, was that shelters would become hotbeds of contagion. The strategy was then shifted towards finding smaller structures in which to relocate the guests, while also deploying more personnel to guarantee both a day and a night shift in order to limit outings.

“We are not able to guarantee zero risk of contagion, of course, but the situation has dramatically improved,” he says.

Soon, however, the question of what to do with the guests who needed to be quarantined arose. A semi-abandoned structure owned by the municipality in the northern periphery of Quarto Oggiaro was hastily repurposed to host those requiring isolation.

The paint on the bright yellow walls of the new building on Via Carbonia – where Marco was transferred after developing a fever – is barely dry. A detailed navigation system guide operators and guests to safety: an arrow pointing to the right dictates the route to a “dirty” area where personal protection can be removed and disposed of, and another arrow then leads on to a “clean” area, where no contamination can occur.

The system was set up by Emergency, an Italian medical NGO recently involved in the containment of the Ebola outbreak in several African states.

“All these social workers, educators and cleaners have found themselves in the midst of an epidemic and did not know what to do,” Eleonora Dotti, project leader for Emergency, says. “We had sessions to show them, for example, how to safely put on and remove personal protection equipment.”

On a sheet of paper on each door, operators log body-temperature measurements taken twice a day for a quarantine period of 14 days. For Marco, the scare of potentially having been infected has been counterbalanced by his stay. “It was heaven here,” he says, speaking through a narrow window from where he receives his meals. If he could, he would avoid going back to the shelter, but the unseasonably cold weather and his age have left him no choice. “I’m too run down for the street,” he says.

The coronavirus emergency has highlighted Italy’s economic vulnerabilities and now the country is at risk of a serious recession – with Goldman Sachs forecasting a contraction of 11.6 per cent in GDP.

Authorities have been reticent to make predictions about the economic repercussions of the lockdown, but its effects are already being felt. Alessandro Radicchi, founder of Binario 95, a social cooperative aimed at fostering social inclusion, says his team is already catering for “the new poor”.

“We have been approached by families in need of food who are relying on dwindling savings to get by,” he says. While authorities in Milan have been quick to set up a strategy to cater to the needy, aid has been lagging behind in Rome – where he is based – and in the southern regions.

A state fund was set up in Milan to distribute financial aid to families who lost their income in the first quarter of 2020 and who must pay rent or a mortgage. About 50,000 to 60,000 people will also become eligible to receive food vouchers of €150 per family for a period of two months. A hotline and an online registration system are being set up to list those who identify themselves as in need and to verify their financial status.

According to Rabaiotti, the aid will still likely not be enough to provide for everyone’s needs. “This is a first step,” he says.

“We are aiming to collect data on the [vulnerable] families who are still unknown to us, in the hope to be able to better plan a response once we have the full picture.”