How COVID-19 turned my life upside down

Published

2 years ago

July 28, 2023

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Please note: This article contains some content that our readers may find distressing. Share on Pinterest Design by Medical News Today; photograph courtesy Paolo Fu

On March 10th, when I returned from a holiday in Trentino, I developed a fever. It was not very high, about 100.04F, and, following the guidelines of the Ministry, I reported myself to the toll-free number set up by the region and requested a swab to check if I had contracted COVID-19.

I didnt receive the test because I have not been in a red zone, and I was not certain that I had been in close contact with people who had tested positive for the virus.

Over the phone, they told me to check my temperature and symptoms, but that I shouldnt warn the people I had been in contact with, in case I caused them panic. I was told I could do this later if the symptoms became worse.

The next day in Italy, the lockdown started. Offices and shops were forced to close, and nobody could leave the house without a valid reason and self-certification; any kind of meeting was forbidden, and proximity to elderly people was not recommended.

The virus hit hard. There were thousands dead in the north, and the epidemic seemed to be out of control. Streets were deserted and people left the supermarkets empty. It really seemed like war, and for many older people, this situation evoked terrible memories.

In a short time, the symptoms disappeared, but psychologically, I suffered a lot from the condition as I was unable to go out, see my friends, or visit my parents.

I had to reorganize my whole life, the way I work, and the way I relate with others. I was also unsure that I would still have a job at the end of lockdown, and this scared me a lot. Everything was changing so quickly, and all my certainties were wavering. Chasing a diagnosis

Around March 20th, my father sickened. He had a fever and was in a state of confusion. My mother, who is visually impaired and very dependent on him, was suffering from panic.

Until that moment, I had never visited them because I knew they were at high risk due to their age, but since I could not leave them alone with my father in such conditions, I was forced to go there. My wife and my son came with me.

I called the reporting number again to urgently request the swab for my father, but they refused it. I didnt know what to do, the virus had blocked the country, and anything, even the most trivial task, was now complicated.

With great difficulty, I found a doctor who came to the house. My father had bronchitis, and he was prescribed with antibiotics. He felt very tired and didnt want to eat. For all of us, the situation was so hard.

Finally, the fever stopped, and my father got better for a day, even though he continued to feel very tired.

On March 24th, he woke up with very strong pain in his lower abdomen. We thought that it was an intestinal blockage, and we called the doctor again, but it was useless. The pain didnt decrease.

I spent the night with him, massaging his back and belly, hoping to relieve his suffering. I had to make a decision, the fear of taking him to the hospital was so big given the situation, but at home, I wouldnt know how to handle it.

On the morning of March 25th, I took him to the emergency room. Thats the last time I saw him.

They called us from the hospital saying that CT scans showed an intestinal perforation and interstitial pneumonia from COVID-19 and that the situation was very serious.

The following days were a nightmare. The lockdown didnt allow us to visit him, and, moreover, having been in contact with him, we were in compulsory quarantine. From that moment on, we could no longer go out even to shop or throw out the garbage.

These were very difficult days.

On the one hand, the concern for my fathers health and the frustration of not being able to visit or hear him; on the other, the fear for the health of my family.

Given the real possibility of being infected, I tried again to get the swab, but since we were asymptomatic, they denied it to us that time too.

I was afraid, and I didnt know what to expect. This virus can remain silent for days and then suddenly burst. I was afraid for my loved ones and myself.

I took immunosuppressants for autoimmune disease, and this could make things worse. My mother is 82 years old, and we were both at high risk. I didnt understand why they wouldnt swab us.

I tried to filter some bad news arriving from the hospital about my fathers health with my mother, for her not to be worried too much, but at the same time, I didnt want to create false illusions. Seeing her suffer made me sick.

The only lights were my wife, who had been very close to me, and my son, who filled the house with joy and happiness.

March 28th was my sons birthday, he had waited so long for it, and he would have liked to do it at the zoo with his friends, but we found ourselves locked in the house with the terror that my father would die that very day.

It was a hectic time, but in the end, we managed to organize a live party with his friends via Zoom and ordered him presents online. For a moment, we forgot everything and dedicated ourselves to him. Mourning in quarantine

Another 9 days passed by, and there were only 2 days left until the end of our quarantine.

I wanted to go out, as I felt like I couldnt take it anymore, but I needed to get my immunosuppressant shot. If I was positive it could cost me my life, I was afraid and tried again to request the swab. In the end, I got it, but only for me and my mother.

In the meantime, my father got worse, and on April 7th at 1:30 a.m., I received a call from the hospital saying that, unfortunately, he had passed away. The world collapsed on me.

I didnt know what to do anymore. My point of reference was gone. I felt lost, desperate, and, as if that wasnt enough, I was the one who had to communicate it to my mother and my brother.

That morning was endless. We were stuck at home, we had just suffered a very serious mourning, and I was forced to solve all the bureaucratic things, as soon as possible, because the hospital couldnt keep the corpse of a COVID-19 patient for long.

I called my brother, and we tried to figure out what to do since the rules imposed by the Ministry at the funeral establish that only three people can attend. Furthermore, there was no possibility to respect the Jewish religious rite.

My mother and I were still in quarantine, and we couldnt attend the funeral. At that moment, the only person who was able to go was my brother, my cousin, and a friend who accompanied him. My mother and my family attended the funeral via Zoom.

The situation was really surreal, and I felt like I was living in a nightmare. By the way, on the day of the funeral, they were supposed to come home to swab us, and I was terrified that they could arrive during the service. Thankfully, they arrived later.

They showed up at our house with an ambulance and started preparing themselves. They put two overalls on top of each other, shoe covers, two pairs of gloves, hoods, visors, and masks, and headed towards our apartment before the incredulous eyes of neighbors from other condominiums.

They rang the door and told us to go out to the ground floor, against all privacy, to swab us. We felt dirty.

In the meantime, the quarantine was over, but we had to wait for the results of the swab to come out in 3 days time. I was positive, and my mom was negative.

At that point, they had to come and swab my wife and son. I got another one for my mother too. She was positive at that time, too, while the rest of the family was negative, so we decided, for their own safety, to send them to another place to pass the quarantine.

It was a difficult decision because, without my wife and son, the house is empty and silent. Everything has changed

I am tired and stressed. More than the virus, what really kills me is this forced confinement and the lack of affection from my loved ones and friends.

One evening, maybe because of stress, I was struck by colic. The pain was very strong, and my mother was in panic.

I wanted to call an amulance but, being positive, they would take me to a COVID center, and my mother would stay alone, and I didnt feel like it.

Luckily, I was able to calm the pain, but the idea of not being able to get sick, not being able to call a doctor, and not being able to go to the pharmacy because Im positive is very distressing; its like being in a science fiction movie.

In order to be considered not contagious anymore, one must have two consecutive negative swabs.

On May 3rd, I made my first negative swab. Unfortunately, the second one on May 5th was positive again, and I had to stay at home for another 15 days.

In the end, on May 20th, after two negatives swabs, I was finally free! The quarantine was over, and I could go out again! It was a really strange feeling, and I felt like I was free after a long period in jail.

Now, Im back to normal life again, although nothing is normal anymore.

The schools are still closed, and the kids miss their friends. They have difficulties in adapting to this new situation. The shops and the restaurant are often empty, and the people look to each other in a different way.

This experience has marked me a lot, and I miss the little things I did every day.

We believe we live in a society ready for anything, but a virus was enough to bring a country to its knees and deprive people of the most important things they have: the love of their loved ones, freedom, and physical contact with the people they love.

After the arrival of the virus, everything has changed, and I really dont know if we can go back to normal, to the world we used to know.

Entertainment

Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch’s ‘very odd job’ – acting opposite an enormous bird in The Thing With Feathers

Published

2 hours ago

November 16, 2025

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Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch's 'very odd job' - acting opposite an enormous bird in The Thing With Feathers

He’s played Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Strange, and even voiced The Grinch but acting opposite a seven-foot (2.1m) crow may be one of the strangest roles Benedict Cumberbatch has taken on.

Speaking about his new film, The Thing With Feathers, he admits it’s “a very odd job, there’s no getting away from it”.

If the vision of Cumberbatch wrestling with a giant bird sounds like the sort of amusingly surreal movie you fancy taking a look at next week, it’s important to understand that this is no comedy.

While the film, based on Max Porter’s eclectic novella Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, the film is at times disturbingly funny, but mostly it is an incredibly emotional take on the heartbreaking way we all process grief.

Cumberbatch plays a man whose wife has died suddenly, leaving him with their two young boys. The story itself is split into three parts – dad, boys and crow.

Crow – voiced by David Thewlis – is a figment of dad’s imagination, a sort of “unhinged Freudian therapist” for him, according to Porter.

Cumberbatch, a father of three, said this certainly wasn’t a role he wanted to think about when he returned to his own family each night.

“I didn’t take it home, I didn’t talk about it…You have to work fast when you’re a father of three with a busy home life, you know, it’s very immediate the need they have of you, so you don’t go in and talk about your day crying your eyes out on a sofa with a crow punching you in the face.”

Since Porter’s award-winning work was first published in 2015 it has built a cult following.

Using text, dialogue and poetry to explore grief from various characters’ perspectives, the author says the subject matter is universal.

“Most of us are deeply eccentric in one way or another, like my father-in-law, apparently a very rational, blokey bloke, who’s like ‘when my mum died, a wren landed on the window and I knew it was my mum’.

“Grief puts us into these states where we are more attuned to the natural world and particularly more attuned to symbols and signs. So, imagining a crow moving in with the family actually makes a lot of sense to people, whereas, weirdly, five steps to getting better or get well soon or a hallmark card or whatever doesn’t make much sense to the people when you’re in that storm of pain.”

While the film sees Cumberbatch portray a firestorm of emotions, he says he feels it’s important to tackle weighty issues on screen.

“It is a universal experience, in one way or another you’re ‘gonna lose someone that you love during your life.”

The film, he says, explores grief through a male prism.

“At a time when there’s a lot of very troubling influences on men without female presence in their lives, this thing of scapegoating and seeing the other as a threat, all of that comes into play within the allowance of grief to be a messy, scary, intimidating, chaotic, unruly and out of control place to exist as a man.

“This is a film that just leans into the idea that it’s alright to have feelings, you bury them or hide them at your peril.”

The Thing With Feathers is out in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 21 November.

World

Brazil ‘surprised’ UK not investing in new rainforest fund it helped design

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2 hours ago

November 16, 2025

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Brazil 'surprised' UK not investing in new rainforest fund it helped design

Brazil was “a bit surprised” Britain hasn’t contributed to a new investment fund to protect tropical forests, despite having helped to design it, a senior official has told Sky News.

The Amazon nation has used its role as host of the COP30 climate talks to tout its new scheme, which it drew up with the help of countries including the UK and Indonesia.

With Britain’s budget day looming, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer decided against chipping in when he visited the Amazonian city of Belem this month.

The news came out the day before Brazil was about to launch it.

“The Brazilians were livid” about the timing, one source told Sky News.

Garo Batmanian, director-general of the Brazilian Forestry Service and coordinator of the new scheme, said: “We were expecting [Britain to pay in] because the UK was the very first one to support us.”

The so-called Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF) was drawn up with the help of “very bright people from the UK”, according to Mr Batmanian.

“So we are a bit surprised, but we expect that once internal situations get better, hopefully they will come through,” he added.

The UK’s climate envoy, Rachel Kyte, told Sky News: “The PM agreed the decision was about not doing it now, as opposed to not ever.

“We will look at the TFFF after the budget and are carefully tracking how others are investing.”

The fund has been hailed as a breakthrough – if Brazil can get if off the ground.

Paul Polman, former Unilever boss and now co-vice chair of Planetary Guardians, said it could be the “first forest-finance plan big enough to change the game”.

Why do tropical forests need help?

At their best, tropical forests like the Amazon and the Congo Basin provide food, rainfall and clean air for millions of people around the world.

They soak up carbon dioxide – the main driver of climate change – providing a cooling effect on a heating planet.

But they are being nibbled away at by extractive industries like oil, logging, soy and gold.

Parts of the Amazon rainforest already emit more carbon dioxide than they store.

Other pockets are expected to collapse in the next few decades, meaning they’d no longer be rainforests at all.

Cristiane Mazzetti, senior forest campaigner at Greenpeace Brazil, said: “Science is saying we need to immediately stop deforestation and start restoring what was once lost.

“And in Brazil, we already have enough open land that could be better used for agricultural expansion… There is no need [to open up] new areas.”

Can Brazil’s new investment fund save the world’s rainforests?

For decades, forests have been worth more dead than alive.

Successive attempts to save them have fallen flat because they’ve not been able to flip the economics in favour of conservation, or ensure a long-term stream of cash.

Brazil hopes the TFFF, if it launches, would make forests worth more standing than cut down, and pay out to countries and communities making that happen.

“We don’t pay only for carbon, we are paying for a hectare of standing forest. The more forests you have, the more you are paid,” said Mr Batmanian.

The other “innovation” is to stop relying on aid donations, he said.

“There is a lot of demand for overseas development assistance. It’s normal to have that. We have a lot of crisis, pandemics, epidemics out there.”

Instead, the TFFF is an investment fund that would compete with other commercial propositions.

Mr Polman said: “This isn’t charity, it’s smart economic infrastructure to protect the Amazon and keep our planet safe.”

How does the TFFF raise money?

The idea is to raise a first tranche of cash from governments that can de-risk the fund for private investors.

Every $1 invested by governments could attract a further $4 of private cash.

The TFFF would then be able to take a higher amount of risk to raise above-market returns, Brazil hopes.

That means it could generate enough cash to pay competitive returns to investors and payments to the eligible countries and communities keeping their tropical trees upright.

At least 20% of the payments has been earmarked for indigenous communities, widely regarded as the best stewards of the land. Many, but not all, have welcomed the idea.

Will the TFFF work?

The proposal needs at least $10-25bn of government money to get off the ground.

So far it has raised $5.5bn from the likes of Norway, France, and Indonesia. And the World Bank has agreed to host it, signalling strong credibility.

But it’s a hard task to generate enough money to compete with lucrative industries like gold and oil, many of which governments already invest in.

Dr Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, director of King’s College London’s Brazil Institute, said TFFF has the potential to make it “very financially viable to have a forest as a forest”.

“But the problem is that TFFF would need to compete with these very profitable industries… because you need to capture as much money from governments, from investors.

“And so far it’s not quite balancing the competitiveness of other sectors that are potentially harmful for forests.”

World

COP30: Climate protest in Brazil’s city of Belem aims to hold governments’ feet to the fire

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2 hours ago

November 16, 2025

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COP30: Climate protest in Brazil's city of Belem aims to hold governments' feet to the fire

Hot, humid, loud and proud: the climate protest in the city of Belem was the embodiment of the Amazonian rainforest that surrounds it.

Hawkers brought carts selling bananas, mangoes and coconuts – while demonstrators bore umbrellas, hats and fans to shelter from the scorching tropical sun.

After a week of dreary negotiations at the COP30 climate talks, the streets were alive with the drumming of maracatu music and dancing to local carimbo rhythms on Saturday.

It was a carnival atmosphere designed to elevate sober issues.

Among those out on the streets were Kayapo people, an indigenous community living across the states of Para and Mato Grosso – the latter at the frontier of soy expansion in the Brazilian Amazon.

They are fighting local infrastructure projects like the new Ferrograo railway that will transport soy through their homeland.

The soy industry raises much-needed cash for Brazil’s economy – its second biggest export – but the kayapo say they do not get a slice of the benefit.

Uti, a Kayapo community leader, said: “We do not accept the construction of the Ferrograo and some other projects.

“We Kayapo do not accept any of this being built on indigenous land.”

Many Brazilian indigenous and community groups here want legal recognition of the rights to their land – and on Friday, the Brazilian government agreed to designate two more territories to the Mundurucu people.

It’s a Brazilian lens on global issues – indigenous peoples are widely regarded as the best stewards of the land, but rarely rewarded for their efforts.

In fact, it is often a terrible opposite: grandmother Julia Chunil Catricura had been fighting to stay on Mapuche land in southern Chile, but disappeared earlier this year when she went out for a walk.

Lefimilla Catalina, also Mapuche, said she’s travelled two days to be here in Belem to raise the case of Julia, and to forge alliances with other groups.

“At least [COP30] makes it visible” to the world that people are “facing conflicts” on their land, she said.

She added: “COP offers a tiny space [for indigenous people], and we want to be more involved.

“We want to have more influence, and that’s why we believe we have to take ownership of these spaces, we can’t stay out of it.”

They are joined by climate protesters from around the world in an effort to hold governments’ feet to the fire.

Louise Hutchins, convener of Make Polluters Pay Coalition International, said: “We’re here to say to governments they need to make the oil and gas companies pay up for the climate destruction – they’ve made billions in profits every day for the last 50 years.”

After three years of COPs with no protests – the UAE, Egypt, and Azerbaijan do not look kindly on people taking to the streets – this year demonstrators have defined the look, the tone and the soundtrack of the COP30 climate talks – and Saturday was no different.

Whether that will translate into anything more ambitious to come out of COP30 remains to be seen, with another week of negotiations still to go.

For now, the protests in Belem reflect the chaos, the mess and the beauty of Brazil, the COP process, and the rest of the world beyond.