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Basel, Switzerland 2020
Unable to take pictures, due to the strict Swiss privacy regulation, and working on similarities and parallels, this job is a personal point of view on the life in Basel during the recent Coronavirus world wide pandemic.
Since my arrival in late February 2020 - close to the European outbreak - I constantly kept framing the city. The Swiss government didn’t get much chances to photographers to document the pandemic situation from the inside the system. The first idea to document the many efforts of the Covid-19 workers unit in hospital and on the streets, it didn’t find a way to be accomplished. After many personal requests denied from the offices in charge, I decided to turn my camera away from the facts and tell the pandemic in a way different from a photojournalist reportage.
The pictures gathered in triptych are part of a serie of social network posts I created to tell abroad that nobody was talking about Switzerland but numbers were often worst than in the rest of Europe. Cantons infected the most were the ones close to the borders, but the whole country, especially in the bigger cities, has been strongly impacted. Compared to the neighbouring European countries, the approach of the Swiss Federal Government has been less restrictive. Rules and correct behaviour has been strongly suggested but never imposed. The information the Swiss population received, they came from the many FOPH press releases (Federal Office of the Public Health). In every communication the message to the citizens was crystal clear: everyone has the responsibility on its hand. Pushing hard on the idea of democracy and freedom, the government rely on the proudly Swiss civic sense the personal responsibility of not spreading the virus, implying the possible fault too. Ideally it could work if is not for the fact that in a city like Basel immigrants are over 36% and the number will jump over 60% with commuters.
The lack of strict rules made the infection percentage rise high. In case of conclamate infection, people has been asked to stay at home to avoid the spread of the infection and to fight the virus from there with the support of the medical staff. Despite data published every day from the FOPH, people seemed not to be aware of the virus danger and how the situation was critical. Most of them kept going on living their lives around the Rhein and the many gathering points around the city, letting the children play and widely not respecting the social distancing.
To date - November 2020 - cases are rising since June, borders are still open and the list of the dangerous countries who needed quarantine and announcement, has been reduced from more than fifty to only a few, with an alarming motivation: abroad countries have an infection rate higher than the local one, so it is safe go and come back from those countries. A strange way to see the country public health.
Winter is coming and the mood for the next months here in Switzerland is clear: stay at home because Switzerland is not a Covid-19 free zone.
The virus is not disappeared.
Basel is not free from Corona.