Or, more exactly, “quarantine inside quarantine”.

(this is a family addendum, that may be updated next week, to my series of COVID19 chronicles from locked down Italy, and what they mean for the world).

I announced in my previous report that my whole family will stay in stricter than standard lockdown until Easter Monday, because my daughter just returned from abroad. This added a new whole dimension to lockdown.

This is how she greeted us:

Besides the mask, notice the clogs: she had put them on just one minute before the shot, after putting her travel shoes in a bag, before even entering home. She has never got any closer than that to any of us, since then.

The day she arrived, she had to communicate her arrival, residence and health conditions to the municipal Health Department. She has to take temperature twice a day, report any anomaly to that office and stay away from the rest of family, never leaving her room for two weeks period.

Until then, the whole households must not recycle any garbage, just send it all to the incinerator, and leave home as little as possible. The garbage collection agency calls to know if we need someone to pick it up.

We are lucky enough to have a small spare room side by side with a second bathroom, so she can (following the Ministry of Health guidelines) segregate herself there for two weeks, with her own supply of disposable cutlery and dishes, towel, soap, termometer, etc… At meal times, we leave a tray one meter from her door, step back, she exits to gets the food, goes back and closes the door. Thirty minutes later, the whole rite is reversed. Sometimes, we talk, each standing on his or her bedroom door. Otherwise, it’s phone calls from one room to the other.

To make things more interesting, the washer is in the “red zone” bathroom. So we make separate loads (her stuff or our stuff), sanitizing the whole bathroom, door jambs included, every single time we have to enter it (with mask and gloves, of course, even if it’s inside home).

I wonder how many fanatic preppers are prepared to a situation like this, that is to live separated not by the rest of the world, but from somebody else with an infective disease under the same one roof where they had so smartly amassed all their food, medicines, batteries and so on.