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Flinn

The Dude goes into politics! - Dealing with the Covid and the restart

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This is how I protected myself, Covid had no chances against the power of Nirn's Magic!

Hello there my dear readers, it's been a long while since my last blog on this series, which was 7 months ago.. at the time no one could really imagine that anything like the Covid pandemic would happen, however all in all it ended well for us, as you will see if you keep reading this blog

We are a small municipality you all know by now, but that does not mean that we have not been exposed, mostly because we are close to Rome and also because many of us (me included) travel aboard because of business or anyways around Italy. The Covid pandemic really surprised everybody and not just in Italy, and we as the Public Administration had to react quickly to do our best to contain it, something we succeeded at very well, if not for a single focus: if you have followed a bit what happened in Italy, you would know that the main infection sites were Hospitals, Hospices and other kinds of private assistance structures.. that happened as well in our small Municipality, since we have a private run Hospice. It's a small one (a total of 15 people including both hosts and workers) and it arrived there from outside (I mean another Hospice outside of our Municipality, something we could not control since, absurdly, moving people around hospitals and hospices wasn't prohibited even during the peak of the pandemic...
However, despite this idiocy, we acted quickly and put the place on quarantine, luckily only 4 people were infected and none of them in a serious way, and after 15 days all of them were cured.. However, the risk was very high, since one of those infected was a worker and she used to go to do grocery shopping for the Hospice at our local stores and one of the infected host was an old lady who use to smoke like a chimney and bought cigarettes locally.. for 2 weeks people were really crazy about this situation and we had to deal with many of them complaining about "why do we have a Hospice here?".. it was stressing but funny to deal with the fear of people, it reminded me that me being a Dudeist is a great thing for my life and for those who live around me.
We had a fair deal of issues to distribute the so called "shopping bonuses" which were basically vouchers of 100 to 400 euros that we could be giving to people at need and that everybody, everybody, was trying to have.. I'm not really proud of my fellow countrymen, but I believe we did a good job in giving those bonuses to the people really at need; of course a lot of other people wasn't content, but they had to deal with that (basically we just followed the rules the State set for this distribution, all that we had to do was to check carefully what people was auto-certifying in order to avoid frauds). The craziest part about these vouchers is that the Central Government said that the money for them were going to be taken from a special fund, while instead they have been taken by the money fund that we should be using in the second part of the year for regular maintenance of the Municipality properties.. the Government said they are going to give them back "anytime in the future", if they don't we will be in real troubles the second part of the year!!!

Other than this we had only limited cases of people put on quarantine because of "possible infection", but none of them was actually infected (people coming from outside of our Municipality, for the most, and also one case of an old couple whose daughter is living in Rome and that got infected because of work).. I have to say that it could have been much worse and that we have been lucky all in all.. this poses another threat now anyways: people isn't really much inclined to respect the actual limitations of "Phase 3", since most of them say "we didn't have problems before, why should we have them now?" and this is something we are trying to deal as an Administration. Even if it's not our direct responsibility to check what people is doing, we are doing our best to tell them to comply with the rules of Phase 3 in order to avoid a) risks of getting infected and b) risk of getting fined (and then coming to complain to us! ).

Another negative aspect of the actual "post-Covid" situation are the additional delays caused in any bureaucratic procedure we have to deal with (remember the Ugly Beast chapter? it's now increased tenfold!); worst part is about having to run 3 different competitive exams to employ 3 missing public employees, and we have to do that respecting all the actual limitations, which means that there aren't any place were we can run them.. solution? we have to rent a special place which has enough space and that will cost us 900 € per day .. this because we can afford those moneys, especially now that people has no money themselves and are not paying (many of them aren't actually) the local taxes and that represent a good deal of the income of our Municipality... yes I'm being sarcastic

Crazy times ahead, but we keep fighting..

Updated July 09, 2020 at 09:18 AM by Flinn

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Comments

  1. makanyane's Avatar
    Interesting to hear how things are going there, thanks for posting this. Stay safe!

    ...and let us know if you ever do get that Central Government money...
  2. Flinn's Avatar
    there would me much more to say Mak, I limited myself to the most "interesting" points ; if I have to say something, there's a lot to learn in this experience, it'e very formative and it's worth the hassle, even in a country like Italy

    ...and let us know if you ever do get that Central Government money...
    it was not much money, roughly 20k €, still for a small Municipality like ours, it represents circa 2 months of regular maintenance expenses..
  3. Flinn's Avatar