At virus milestone, Italian priest reflects on loss, lessons

SERIATE, Italy (AP) — If there is anything the Rev. Mario Carminati and the traumatized residents of Italy’s Bergamo province remember about the worst days of the coronavirus outbreak, it’s the wail of ambulance sirens piercing the silence of lockdown.

Around the clock for weeks on end, ambulances screamed through Bergamo’s valleys and towns in a terrifying soundtrack of death, as mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers gasping for air were rushed to the hospital. Thousands never came back.

As the world counts more than 1 million COVID-19 victims, the quiet of everyday life and hum of industry has returned to Bergamo, which along with the surrounding Lombardy region was the one-time epicenter of the outbreak in Europe. But the memory of those dark winter days, and the monumental toll of dead they left behind, has remained with those who survived only to see the rest of the world fall victim, too.

“They would never stop,” Carminati, the parish priest of the Bergamo town of Seriate, recalled of the ambulances. “They would drive by continuously and you would wonder ‘When will this end?’”

Bergamo recorded its first positive case Feb. 23, two days after Italy’s first locally transmitted case was detected. By the end of March, the province of Bergamo had registered a 571% increase in deaths compared with the five-year monthly average — the biggest increase in Italy and one of the biggest localized increases in mortality rate in Europe.

Many of those deaths don’t even figure into Italy’s official COVID-19 toll of 35,851, the second highest in Europe after Britain, because so many of Bergamo’s victims died at home or in nursing homes without having ever been tested. Seriate, a town of 25,000 along Bergamo’s Serio river, was particularly hard-hit, losing 200 residents. Carminate says around...