‘I Love You So Much’: Italian Woman’s Post on Staying Quarantined to Protect Father Goes Viral

A Facebook post from a daughter in Milan to her father in southern Italy has gone viral amid the nation’s growing coronavirus fears.

“I love you so much that I have decided to stay away from you,” wrote the daughter to her father, explaining why she has decided not to join so many other southern Italians in fleeing home from quarantined zones in Italy’s northern regions.

While swarms of southern Italians attempt to escape the newly quarantined zones in Italy’s northern regions, a daughter’s message to her father has gone viral, according to a report by La Repubblica.

The daughter — who is from the southern region of Calabria — wrote to her father on Sunday to tell him that she is staying in Milan, because she loves him.

“Dear dad, in these hours everyone is running away from Milan to join their loved ones down south. I did not do it,” wrote Katya Imbalzano to her father on Facebook.

“Don’t think that I don’t love you,” she added. “I love you so much that I have decided to stay away from you. You tell me that you are well and you are taking all the necessary precautions… and that’s okay… I love you from a distance.”

Meanwhile, the relatives of Italians who decided to return home from the nation’s northern quarantined zones are angered, asking their loved ones, “have you come to infect us?” according to a report by Corriere della Sera.

The report added that family members who welcome home relatives fleeing from Milan have been deemed “irresponsible.”

Meanwhile, the governor of Italy’s southern Puglia region, Michele Emiliano, took to social media to call on Italians heading south from Lombardy — and other quarantined areas — to “stop and go back,” reports La Repubblica.

“I speak to you as if you are my children, my brothers, my grandchildren: stop and go back,” pleaded Emiliano. “Get off at the first train station, do not take planes to Bari and Brindisi, go back with the cars, leave the bus at the next stop.”

“Do not bring the [northern] epidemic to your [southern] Puglia,” he added.

As of Monday, Italy has suffered a total of 9,172 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 463 deaths, which means that 97 people have died of the virus in just the last 24 hours, as Sunday’s death toll was 366.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.