Milan to Delhi during the days of coronavirus

Phase I

I was reading the news and came to know about the new virus that was spreading in China. Well, I did not read in detail about it. The virus was not even called covid19. Later I came across more articles regarding the same and gradually understood the severity of the situation in China. Countries began evacuating their citizens and the world was slowly realizing the potential crisis. Even then, we were in denial because we were living in Italy. Honestly, I did not expect it to hit Europe. Exams, study holidays, cooking experiments, and our lives went on smoothly without any troubles.

Phase II

The virus had started spreading in India as well. It had reached Kerala to be more precise. But Kerala had taken enough measures, in fact, praiseworthy measures which helped them to contain the virus. Within a few days from then, Italy reported its first case. Luckily it didn’t spread much and all the other infected patients healed. Though we were slightly concerned, we were still in denial. We tried to believe that the virus would not hit any other country and that we were safe.

Phase III

Not after many days, Italy started reporting cases. The cases were in Lombardy, the province which includes Milan. We followed the news regularly, debated about the spread of the virus and measures that we should take. Even then never did we expect the virus to spread this vigorously, not just around Italy but around the entire world.

We started getting messages and calls from our loved ones inquiring about our health and situation in our area. We were pretty optimistic and believed that we could survive without facing many difficulties. Against everybody’s expectation, the count increased drastically, infecting almost thousands within days. Most of the students returned to their respective home countries. The university was supposed to reopen in the last week of February but postponed it by a week.