Coronavirus lockdown traps Charlotte-area student in Italy as death toll rises
Rebecca Ross is stuck at the global epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic — and she’s smiling.
“Welcome to my kitchen,” she told me via Skype, gesturing on the screen toward the back of her modest apartment in the middle of Milan, Italy.
A month ago, that apartment contained four students. The other three have gone home. Ross — a 24-year-old graduate student from Lincoln County who has been studying at the Milano Fashion Institute since January — has stayed.
At first, she didn’t want to go home. Now she couldn’t leave if she wanted to. She is marooned in Milan.
Ross has a handwritten note she shows me, one she painstakingly crafted in her beginner-level Italian. The American Embassy told her to write it. She leaves her apartment about once every 10 days to buy groceries, and the note asks authorities not to fine her or throw her in prison for being on the streets during the national lockdown.
“I don’t think I was ever afraid of catching the virus,” Ross said. “I’m just a little bored, and worried about my mental stability going forward. And also now I’m worried about people in the United States, just because we’re about two weeks in front of you guys in dealing with all this. I don’t want the same mistakes to be made in the States that were made here. I don’t want the death rate in America to surpass Italy’s.”
I’ve known Ross since she was a child. She was born in Charlotte, then attended the same church as my family and the same Lincoln Charter high school in Denver, N.C., as my children. A bubbly extrovert and a fine writer — she worked on the campus newspaper at Western Carolina before her college graduation in 2018 — Ross hasn’t had an in-person conversation in English with anyone since March 6, and she’s been stuck in her apartment about 99 percent of the time for the past month. She is a millennial who has seen firsthand what happens when people in her age group ignore the virus and think of this time instead as a “cool little vacation.”
Said Ross: “I am literally in another country where I don’t speak the language. ... I’m a little freaked out.”
She has seen video clips of oblivious college students partying in Florida during spring break and said they made her cry “angry tears.” What would she tell those people?
“Stop being selfish,” she said. “Stop thinking about yourself in the situation. Think about other people.”
Rising death toll in Italy
Italy has surpassed China as the country that has suffered more virus-related deaths than anywhere in the world. Italy announced 793 deaths Saturday and then 651 more Sunday, bringing the country’s overall death toll at that time to 5,476, according to Johns Hopkins University. By comparison, the U.S. has had only about a tenth that many deaths due to COVID-19 thus far.
Italy serves as a cautionary tale for much of the world, with the mixed messages by its politicians and scientists from several weeks ago contributing to people sticking with their usual daily routines far longer than they should have, according to a New York Times story.
In the Lombardy region where Ross lives, schools, museums and theaters were shut down as of Feb. 23. Ross’s school moved to online classes. And yet, the bars and restaurants remained full.
“Everyone was acting like no one really cared that much,” Ross said. “And I feel like that’s the mindset that got us into trouble, when everything was being treated like it wasn’t a big deal.”
Ross is the first to admit her behavior was far from perfect during those first two weeks. When the news of her Milan college going to online classes first came, she used the extra flexibility in her schedule to hop a cheap flight to Paris with a friend for a few days. She kept going to Starbucks and out to eat.
“Basically, I would be the first to admit that I did not think that this was a serious thing at first,” Ross said. “I just saw it as memes on Facebook and Twitter, and Instagram — just as a joke. I think that’s what happened to a lot of my generation. ... And once we were told that our generation, in the younger community wouldn’t get sick, we kept that in our heads.”
Even March 8, she wrote in a blog post that “things are fine.”
She dismissed the entreaties from friends and family to return to America that day just as she had before, writing: “Am I coming home? Am I staying inside? The answer is no (sorry mom).”
A life from a movie
Susan McGinnis, Rebecca’s mother, begged her daughter to come home from Italy for days. “It’s a tough situation,” she said by phone from Denver, N.C. “But at this point, I’m just replacing my fear with my faith. Rebecca is going to stick it out now. Even if she could come home now, she’d just have to start over with all the quarantining again.”
Ross’s online classes are in session during the national lockdown. She keeps busy with those, as well as video chats with friends. She also watches a lot of Netflix and has read eight books online in the past month, she said.
She has adapted to the rapidly changing situation in Italy the best she can, writing in her most recent blog post Sunday: “I can honestly say I never in a million years thought I would have to have my temperature checked and stand in a 45-minute line to enter a grocery store. ... The life I am living is something that you can only imagine out of a movie.”
She would just as soon that this movie would end, though she knows that isn’t coming anytime soon. She said she broke down in a significant way only once, about a week ago, crying hard about her loneliness and isolation. Since then, though, she said she’s been OK, relying on her faith and frequent video chats with her friends and family to get her through.
Ross lives close to the Duomo cathedral, the primary tourist attraction in Milan. The streets are mostly deserted now, she said. She hasn’t felt sick, hasn’t been tested and doesn’t know anyone personally who has gotten the coronavirus.
“At this point, I’m just going to ride it out,” she said. “I don’t want to start from square one somewhere else in quarantine and isolation. I’m used to it now, and I think I made the right decision to stay. ... But please, just heed the warnings. Even if you don’t think it’s that serious, I promise you it is.”
This story was originally published March 23, 2020 at 4:29 PM.
