Both Italy and Iran currently suffering heavily have strong recent ties to China. The leather goods industry near Milan has workers who went home to China over the holidays. Most of Iran’s international commerce is now with China. An Iranian from Qom flew back from China bringing a case to that city where the devote lick the screen around the local saint’s tomb. Now a Qom cemetery has a 100 yard ditch for bodies. Chinese have been in US far longer than Italy and Iran, and families probably celebrate the New Year in US. Saw that Italy is not identifying the dead as Chinese to prevent prejudice. Below are some interesting links.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2020/03/16/coronavirus-map-how-to-track-coronavirus-spread-across-the-globe/#3fad48faf980 [An excellent series of maps showing distribution and figures on cases.
I spoke with my son in Puerto Rico this evening after I read that the govt. closed the beach. I asked him about the big pharmaceuticals manufacture business that used to be there. He says while some drugs are still made there, a complex about 5 miles square in the southern part of the island has been abandoned for some years now. We should not be depending on China for 80% of our medicines.
https://apnews.com/2d57b506106f131418c7c846d20babc1 [ Serious restrictions and fines, and only 5 sick and no dead.
I also spoke with my military son about Vitamin C experiments China is doing to test the value of high dose C for severely ill Covid 19 victims. He said there were actually U-tube videos about this which have now been removed by Google mgt. Large shipments of C were made to Wuhan, and China has said they are not going to ship more to US, they need it themselves.
https://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=228745
[Saw that Italy is not identifying the dead as Chinese to prevent prejudice. ]
If they’re obscuring it to deceive Italians into thinking that the vast majority of the victims are ethnic Chinese, thereby sparking sympathy instead of anger at that community, word of mouth alone should give the lie to that attempt at myth-making. Then there are the vastly expanded obituary sections in Italian language Italian newspapers:
“On Febrary 9th, obituaries occupied 1.5 pages.
“On March 13th, the paper printed 10 (!!) pages of obituaries.]
Each page had an average of 8 columns and 8 names per column. That’s 64 per page. 10 pages would be 640 names. Before the catastrophe, obituaries were 1-1/2 pages. That’s 96 names. So the increase in daily deaths comes to over 500, which is higher than the daily coronavirus death toll so far. These are obviously rough guesses, but they lead me to wonder whether there are coronavirus deaths that remain unrecorded as pathogen-related. At any rate, my guess is that based on the vast expansion in the obituaries section, the vast majority (perhaps 99%) of coronavirus deaths in Italy are ethnic Italian.
A footnote - not everyone has living relatives willing to pony up for an obituary. And of those who do pay up, presumably not everyone does so in that particular daily. So the obituary expansion in this particular Italian paper is probably not all-inclusive of the extraordinary death toll from this virus.
2nd footnote - if this bug is just the flu, the question is why the obituaries went from 1.5 pages to 10. We’d have to assume that survivors of the coronavirus dead are much more into paying for obituaries than the relatives of people who died from the flu.