I have taken up reading Italian Newspapers (still amazed I can understand so much and thanks to browser translators) and I believe Italians are the epidemiological version of deer caught in the headlights.
Why is there such a huge cluster of infection up north? Italy is an old country in the sense of the age of its people’s age, but I don’t think old people are living all north.
«The health situation in Bergamo is very complicated,’ Gori continued. The city is the epicenter of this emergency. The number of infected continues to grow, of those taken to the hospital, put in intensive care. Unfortunately, the number of deaths is increasing, about 50 a day, 300 in the last week. Meanwhile, doctors in hospitals and GPs are sick, there are more than 70 of them who are ill for doing their job.
Already in these hours some serious patients have been transferred to other regions, which I thank for the availability. Similarly, many bodies were shipped to other places for cremation. The oven in the city of Bergamo is not able to dispose of all the work it has to do;
Coronavirus a Bergamo, Gori da Fazio: «Manca tutto». Borrelli: «Arrivano mascherine»
They are overwhelmed.
I have no idea but wild guesses about bot being ready for even the most basic of epidemics. Was it politics? Bureaucracy? or simply good old Italian relaxed culture?
I hope they figure it out and we get to learn from it.
A couple of thoughts, fair warning, I am not a doctor nor do I play one on TV, this is just speculation on my part. One, Northern Italy is the manufacturing and fashion center of Italy which means a lot of contact with China and other Asian countries. Two, similar to other viruses, Wuhan coronovirus appears to be killed by ultra violet and hot environmental conditions, one reason the flu is seasonal.
Look up how many beds-per-100,000 population Italy’s hospital have (and the similar stat for USA).
Look up how many ICU beds (etcetera).
Can you look up how many ventilators/100,000 in Italy? I saw a figure of 900,000 TOTAL in USA. If 20 % of our population contracts the illness (We should be so lucky!), that’s around 60,000,000 folks. 20 % of infected get ill enough for hospitalization (12,000,000), and 20 % of them require ICU or ventilation that’s 2,400,000 ICu beds required. If we are blessed multiple times, and the epidemic takes 10 months to run out, that might be 240,000/month needing vents and ICU, ON TOP OF all the trauma, heart attacks, sepsis, strokes, miscellaneous surgical badness, that 6 months ago (well, well before Wu-Flu) kept ICUs at circa 90% full, day in and day out, weekends and holidays included, summer/spring/fall/winter.
Not a lot of extra capacity, amirite? Spicy time to be alive!
Bernie made a big deal in his debate about Italy having more beds per capita than the US does.
Today the WSJ debunked that. The US has fewer total hospital beds than a number of other countries — because so much medical care is outpatient care. This is of course a direct consequence of modern medical technology, where the US has long been the leader. (The editorial didn’t go into this point, unfortunately.)
But the number of ICU beds in the USA is higher, in many cases much higher, than that in other countries. As with medical spending, the UK is a particular basketcase here.
I wonder if Bernie knew this and intentionally pushed misleading stats.
I read somewhere over the weekend, that northern Italy has a large number of Chinese immigrants working in the textile industry.
Found the article:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-chinese-workers-who-assemble-designer-bags-in-tuscany