The UN refugee agency and UNICEF have opened at the border of the northeastern Italian region of Friuli Venezia Giulia two 'Blue Dots' areas to support minors, women, families and people with special needs who are fleeing the war in Ukraine.
UNICEF reached 7,000 refugee and migrant children and teens in 2021 through its program in Italy, the organization said in an annual report released on Monday, April 11.
Guest blog by Anna Riatti, coordinator for UNICEF Migrant and Refugee Response in Italy.
I don’t think many of us living and working in Italy really understood what was happening when the Government [of Italy] declared a six-month state of emergency on January 31, 2020. COVID-19 was still new.
We started getting phone calls from friends and colleagues from all over the world to check on our health and families. As the number of affected people and deaths continued to rise, the WHO declared a global pandemic. [From March 9th to May 18], the country [was] in complete lockdown.
On March 31, 2020, Italy marked a national day of mourning. [At that point] there were more than 115,000 people who had tested positive for COVID-19 and about 14,000 people who had died – more deaths than any other country in the world.