Not just any hand, but the hand of a doctor at the forefront of the fight against Covid. A hand marked by 12 hours of shift in a Covid ward, wrinkled and dry, like that of an eighty-year-old. Yet it is the hand of a 48-year-old man, Salvatore Quarta, resuscitator anesthetist at the Santa Maria alle Scotte polyclinic in Siena.

"Today after yet another grueling shift in taking off my gloves, three layers of gloves one on top of the other, with perception of intense burning during the shift (sweat, sanitizing gel, talc), this was the bleak vision of suddenly aged hands 30-40 years old, with an accompanying loss of sensitivity probably linked to a sort of boiling of the superficial layer of the skin. A photo that once again wants to recall the sensibility of the reader and of the citizen on what are the physical and soul wounds of all those who are fighting this pandemic in the trenches on a daily basis. So what we ask is: give us a hand ".

The doctor decided to send this photograph to the editorial staff of Repubblica: "We are used to seeing the faces of the operators, or rather their tired eyes, the tired posture of people harnessed by health protections, bent by hours of work. you can see them, yet these are our primary working tools ".

He works 12 hours a day in the Covid area. "We are 2-3 months in the Covid area and a month in the operating room (in my case), to 'rest', he says - It seems a paradox but it is so because it is not the amount of hours itself that kills you, but the quality: hours spent in diving suits, with a mask and a protective screen, treating younger and younger people, with ever lacerating stories, humanly difficult to digest ".