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[Saw that Italy is not identifying the dead as Chinese to prevent prejudice. ]

I’m not sure why they’re so sensitive about it - it’s a given that the source of the original bug is ultimately Chinese even if Patient Zero is allegedly a German national. But whatever the medium of transmission, the origin obviously lies somewhere in China.

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:

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/coronavirus-obituaries-pages-italian-newspaper-21696391
[”This is the daily newspaper of Bergamo, one of the epidemic hotspot in Italy,” a Twitter caption to the footage read.

“On Febrary 9th, obituaries occupied 1.5 pages.

“On March 13th, the paper printed 10 (!!) pages of obituaries.]

Obituaries are basically classified ads paid for by the relatives of the dead. That’s why they’re usually cloying in tone even for people with no redeeming social value, like mobsters (not to mention lawyers and politicians). Unless you think it’s plausible that relatives of transient Chinese sweatshop workers are paying for obituaries in Italian language newspapers in Italy, I’m gonna guess that the vast majority of deaths from this pathogen are Italian Italians.

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.

Below is a link tracking the growth in deaths and confirmed cases by country 3/16. First there are a number of paragraphs explaining their methodology and explaining the difference between linear growth and exponential growth. There are links to some of the major information established health information sources. Lists of countries at the bottom include little charts which enable you to see how quickly deaths and confirmed cases are changing in each listed country. I was surprised at how many countries now have confirmed cases.

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus

Regarding using obituaries in Italy to track nationality of the dead. I pointed out in another post that the cases in US Chinatown in NY were probably low because this long established Chinese community had family here, and many did not have to go home (China) to celebrate the holidays. If the Chinese workers in the Milan leather trades are new, then a lot of them would have gone to China for the holidays, and without family in Italy their obituaries would not have been submitted.