An Italian couple who had been together for 60 years died without someone to comfort them on their deathbeds, just two hours apart, on Tuesday from coronavirus.
Severa Belotti, 82, and Luigi Carrara, 86, spent the last days of their lives in lockdown, in their hometown of Albino, in the northern Italian province of Bergamo.
Before retiring, Luigi worked as a bricklayer. Severe was a housewife.
Their son, Luca Carrara, claims they were confined to their home, without medical assistance, running a fever of 39 degrees celsius (102.2 Fahrenheit).
The heartbroken son told local newspaper Corriere della Sera that his father, Luigi, who worked as a bricklayer before retirement, was taken to Bergamo hospital on Saturday and his mother, Severa, a housewife, was admitted to the same facility on Sunday.
One died at 9.15am and the other at 11am, less than two hours apart.
Pictured: Severa Belotti, 82, and Luigi Carrara, 86, from Albino, Bergamo, who died from the coronavirus just hours apart in northern Italy on Tuesday
Luca Carrara, pictured, from Albino, Bergamo, took to Facebook to say a last farewell to his parents after he was unable to be at their side when they died on Tuesday
Luca, who the publication said was angry at the time of interview, told them he was unable to see his parents before they died.
‘They died alone, that’s how this virus works,’ he said.
‘Your loved ones are left alone and you can’t even say goodbye, hug them, try to give them some comfort, maybe even a good lie like “everything will be fine”.’
Luca, who works for water utility company Uniacque in Bergamo, is currently quarantined with his wife and two children.
He said his parents were trapped inside for such a long period because ‘there was no doctor nearby.’
Luca tried to call emergency services on ‘112’ but no one came to the rescue.
‘Let it be clear that I do not blame 112 (emergency services),’ he told Corriere della Sera.
‘I understand them and in fact I only have words of thanks because they tried to save them.’
His thoughts on the Papa Juan XXIII hospital in Bergamo, where his parents died, were quite different.
‘In the hospital everything is disastrous,’ he said.
He added that staff don’t know where to put the patients and that the doctors are choosing which people to save, and ‘leaving the elderly to die’.
‘But what can they do?,’ he added.
Unable to say goodbye properly, Carrara took to social media to issue a farewell.
‘Hello, Mom and Dad, this evil virus has taken you both the same day, will you continue arguing up there?,’ he wrote on Facebook.
‘Surely, but then you will end with a hug.’
In a word of warning to other families, Luca added: ‘My father was 86, he was an old man, yes, but he had no previous illness.
An empty street due to the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak in Alzano Lomabardo, one of the Bergamo municipalities of the Middle Seriana Valley for which the establishment of a red zone is being considered, in Bergamo, Italy, 05 March 2020
‘People have to understand that they have to stay home because it is okay for them to keep saying that the victims are just old, but when it happens to their parents, it’s really difficult.
‘I have not seen them again, the bodies have been taken to the cemetery and we know that it will take a few days to cremate them because there are too many dead.
He added that his current situation, under quarantine, has worsened the grief.
‘Myself, my children and my wife are in quarantine,’ he wrote on the Facebook post.
‘So the sadness is twofold.
‘Right now I can’t even see my sister, who has taken care of all the paperwork.
‘No one can come visit me. Nothing.
‘In one day I lost both my parents. But as my father always said, let’s move on.’
There have been a stream of complaints directed against Italian authorities for mismanagement of those in self-isolation amid the coronavirus outbreak in the north of the country.
Yesterday, it was reported that an actor was forced to stay in the same house as his dead, infected sister, for more than 36 hours.
Luca Franzese, who played a member of the ‘sciarmante’ gang in mob TV show Gomorrah, had released a series of impassioned videos, appealing for funeral services to pick up the corpse of his sister, Teresa Franzese, 47, who tested positive for the coronavirus after her death on Saturday.
There have been 12,462 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Italy, the most anywhere outside of mainland China, and 827 people have died.