CARE – From his recent news at the foot of two hilly streets in Rome, Armando Alviti has been distributing newspapers, magazines and goodwill to the locals from before morning until almost at dusk. -every day for more than half a century.
“Ciao, Armando,” his customers greet him as part of their daily work. “Ciao, amore (love)” he shouts back. Alviti shook as he remembered how, as a young boy, newspaper deliverers would drop the piles of the day at his parents’ newspaper, sitting in empty motorcycle baskets. and taken for spinning.
“They were afraid I would die. I know they love me, ”said Alviti.
Across the pandemic, health authorities around the world have stressed the need to protect those most at risk from complications from COVID-19, a group that revealed infection and mortality data rapidly absorbing older adults. With 23% of the population aged 65 or over, Italy has the second oldest population in the world, after Japan, with 28%.
Italy’s average dead age of COVID-19 has reached around 80, many of them with people with medical conditions such as diabetes or heart disease. Some politicians advocated limiting the time elders spent outside their homes to avoid locks of the general population that were costly to the economy.
Among them was the governor of the northwestern Italian coastal region of Liguria, where 28.5 percent of the population is aged 65 or older. Cape Gov. Giovanni Toti, 52, argued for such an age-specific strategy when a second outbreak of disease hit Italy in the fall.
Older people are “largely retired, not essential to productive effort” of the Italian economy, Toti said.
To the Roman news salesman, these were fighting words. Alviti said Toti’s comments were “disgraceful.” They made me angry. ”
“Old people are the life of this country. They are a memorial to this country, ”he said. Older self-employed adults commented in particular that “they cannot be kept under a bell jar,” he said.
The heavy tax on pandemics on the elderly, particularly those in nursing homes, may have reinforced age, or prejudice against the so-called population. usually “old people. ”
The label “old” means “40, 50 years of life split in one category,” said Nancy Morrow-Howell, a professor of social work at the University of Washington in St. Louis. Louis who specializes in geology. She noted that these days, people in their 60s often care for parents in their 90s.
“Age is accepted … it is not questioned,” Morrow-Howell said in a telephone interview. One form he takes is “a merciful age,” said Morrow-Howell, of the idea that we need to protect older adults. We need to treat them like children. “
Alviti’s family won the first round, keeping him away from work until May. His sons persuaded him to stay at home again when the coronavirus fell in the autumn.
He struck a compromise. One of his sons opens the newspaper at 6 in the morning and Alviti takes over two hours later, limiting what he has seen to the public during the morning break.
Fausto Alviti said his father is scared, “but I also understand that for him to stay at home, it would have been worse, psychologically. It has to be with people. ”
In the outdoor food market in Rome’s Trullo area, retailer Domenico Zoccoli, 80, also dismisses the notion that people beyond retirement age do not have to “protect produce (and).”
Before the break of day on a recent wet day, Zoccoli had transformed his stallion into a series of elegant colors: boxes of red and green cabbage, radicchio, purple carrots, leafy beet tops, and caraway in shades of white, violet and oranges, all harvested from his farm about 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) away.
“Older people need to do what they feel. If they can’t walk, they can’t walk. If I feel like running, I run, “said Zoccoli. After packing his stall at 1:30 pm, he said he would work several more hours in his field, skiing. lòn.
Marco Trabucchi, a psychologist based in the northern Italian city of Brescia who specializes in older adults, believes that the pandemic has led people to reconsider. make their ideas for the better.
“Little attention was paid to the loneliness of the elderly. They were like a confused division, all equal, with the same problems, all suffering,” Trabucchi said.
In Italy, with childcare centers suddenly scarce, forces of older adults, some decades after retirement, effectively double as essential workers by caring for their grandchildren.
According to Eurostat, the European Union’s bureau of statistics, 35% of Italians over the age of 65 look after grandchildren several times a week.
Felice Santini, 79, and his wife, Rita Cint, 76, are such couples. They take care of the youngest of their four grandchildren several times a week.
“If we didn’t take care of them, their parents couldn’t work,” said Santini. “We help them (son and daughter-in-law) stay in the productive workforce.”
Santini still works himself, half a day as a mechanic at an auto repair shop. Then, when he gets home, his hands keep busy in the kitchen: filling homemade cannelloni with sausage, making meat sauce and baking orange-flavored Bundt cakes for his grandmothers.
Cint finds her in pain without being able to plug and kiss her grandchildren. But she caught on to 9-year-old Gaia Santini, when the girl happily ran towards her after her grandmother traveled the narrow streets of Rome to pick her up at school. Cinti brings Gaia home for a break, before joining her for an ice skating lesson.
Concerned about the second increase at COVID-19, the couple’s son, Cristiano Santini, said he tried to limit how often his parents watch the children, but to no avail.
“They are scared (of diseases), but they are more afraid of not living much longer,” because of their age and previous wasting time with their grandchildren, he said.