One factor affecting the country's death rate may be the age of its population — Italy has the oldest population in Europe, with about 23% of residents 65 or older, according to The New York Times. The median age in the country is 47.3, compared with 38.3 in the United States, the Times reported. Many of Italy's deaths have been among people in their 80s, and 90s, a population known to be more susceptible to severe complications from COVID-19, according to The Local....
Often, as testing expands within a community, more mild cases are found, which lowers the overall death rate, Gordon said. This was the case in South Korea, which conducted more than 140,000 tests and found a fatality rate of 0.6%, according to Business Insider. - https://www.livescience.com/why-italy-coronavirus-deaths-so-high.html
Italy almost has oldest average age (the US in the top third at 61) out 230 countries .
Meanwhile: Doctors Treating Coronavirus Told to Discriminate Against Elderly Patients : They “Will be Left to Die” (Italy) Yet, "Over 1,000 People Cured [recovered] of Coronavirus in Italy"
Also, an American doctor (who affirms universal HC) who has worked in Italy for 40 years states,
The Italian healthcare landscape includes crumbling hospitals, doctors trained on books rather than patients, and per capita spending one-third that of the United States. And Americans like to say their medical care is the best in the world, while Italians consider their National Health Service to be hopelessly dysfunctional. (In 2000 the World Health Organization ranked the Italian system second-best on the planet. But that stellar rating was based solely on equality of access on the one hand and health outcomes such as life expectancy on the other, ignoring any on-the-ground realities in between: waiting times, emergency room efficiency, surgical statistics, etc.)
But here’s the rub: Italians are much healthier than Americans in terms of everything from overall health longevity, infant mortality, obesity, cancer, diabetes, suicide, drug overdoses, homicides, and disability rates. On many of those measures, they beat out the UK as well.
The latter is much due to culture: that of a healthier lifestyle and diet. - https://www.thelocal.it/20190322/what-can-italy-teach-the-rest-of-the-world-about-health
further site-searching on "America" finds her also stating this reveling insight from 2018:
Americans who knew something about Italy used to nod knowingly when I’d tell them the National Health Service was going from bad to worse,
Mario Monti.. installed to take over from Berlusconi as Prime Minister, who proceeded to force austerity with a vengeance on Italian regions in deficit, which meant most of them. Poof! there went the hospital beds, and the staffing, leaving patients amassed on gurneys in emergency room halls. Mario did more damage to ordinary Italians’ health care in one year than Silvio had in seventeen.
The right-wing League and the no-wing Five-Star Movement, the two parties currently – and improbably – sharing power, have made rosy joint promises to restore funding for the public medical sector, fight corruption, and improve services. Plus promising their constituents everything from earlier retirement to a guaranteed minimum income.
But it’s all pie in the sky, based on a magic trick....When they cobbled together a government, each party stuck to its own promises, despite the glaring contradiction between taking in less and spending more. - http://www.stethoscopeonrome.com/2018/12/warning-politics-may-be-bad-for-your.html
,Te average age at death from the disease in Italy stood at 81 earlier this month, according to the country’s health department. Related:
https://medium.com/@ra.hobday/coronavirus-and-the-sun-a-lesson-from-the-1918-influenza-pandemic-509151dc8065 Coronavirus and the Sun: a Lesson from the 1918 Influenza Pandemic . Put simply, medics found that severely ill flu patients nursed outdoors recovered better than those treated indoors. A combination of fresh air and sunlight seems to have prevented deaths among patients; and infections among medical staff.
`Open-Air’ Treatment in 1918 During the great pandemic, two of the worst places to be were military barracks and troop-ships. Overcrowding and bad ventilation put soldiers and sailors at high risk of catching influenza and the other infections that often followed it.[2,3] As with the current Covid-19 outbreak, most of the victims of so-called `Spanish flu’ did not die from influenza: they died of pneumonia and other complications.
Al Jazeera reports:
At the end of December, an uncommon number of pneumonia cases arrived at the hospital of Codogno in northern Italy, the head of the emergency ward, Stefano Paglia, told the newspaper La Repubblica. Some of these patients could carry the coronavirus, but doctors treated them as typical winter diseases.
Unfortunately, a decisive contribution to the spread of the infection was given by the health facility itself, due to the amount of medical staff and attendees going through the compound daily. "The hospital acted as a multiplier," Walter Ricciardi, executive board member of the World Health Organization (WHO) and consultant for the Italian health ministry, told Al Jazeera.
Italy has tested more than 42,000 people so far, while other European Union countries performed significantly fewer controls. This scrupulous search inflated the tally, he said. (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/03/coronavirus-wreaks-havoc-italy-tests-limits-health-system-200307112350888.html)
China owns the professional soccer team in Milan. They have invested Billions of $$$ there.
Think of it as their door to the E.U. and Africa.
Add a dash of socialized medicine in a "Union" that is anything but....not one EU country answered Italy's plea for help in treating the virus outbreak.
How many of the elderly who died in Italy were elderly Chinese?
Thank you for all that additional information. One thing I have not seen any mention of is how many of the patients in Italy, or deaths, are of ethnic Chinese.