A Tale of Two Countries: Northern Italy could learn from Switzerland’s Covid-19 experience

City Journal ^ | May 5, 2020 | Fabio Villa

[CheshireTheCat]

...The streets of Milan, just three hours by car from Geneva, remain empty, the medical facilities still under enormous stress. Before the pandemic, ambulances arrived on site in eight minutes. At the peak of the outbreak, with so many trips to make, it took over an hour. In the region’s hospitals, the typical Covid-19-related death is an 80-year-old with severe preexisting medical conditions, like chronic bronchitis or heart disease; I think of my parents, who, though elderly, don’t have the health issues that would necessarily make a Covid-19 infection life-threatening. Yet, if they had an accident, they’d likely have died waiting for an ambulance to arrive.

The Italian problem was long in the making. Years of cost-cutting have centralized health-care delivery in large, state-run hospitals. Thousands of retired family doctors who treated patients in their own clinics or made home visits haven’t been replaced...

[CheshireTheCat]

A lot of the problems we are seeing with high death rates in certain countries, parts of countries, and individual nursing homes are due to bad policies and practices unique to those places.

[Abby4116]

I believe northern Italy had many come/return from China - workers in their garment industry - just prior to the outbreak. Geneva did not have the same traffic.

[Tacrolimus1mg]

Italy can thank their cash-strapped public health care system. This is why socialized medicine is not the way to go, especially when huge crises like pandemics occur.

[CheshireTheCat]

True.

If I were a leader of a country that wanted to take over the world, I would send a bunch of infected people from my country back to a country ill equipped to handle them so that a world-wide panic leading to a depression leading to a weakened superpower (USA) would be the result.

I’m just saying that people have to realize the differences in Place A from Place B that result in this virus only be a real problem in Places like A because A has had stupid people running it voted in by equally stupid people.

[ThisLittleLightofMine]

It would be interesting to know how many people had received the flu vaccine this year and if it increased death rate.

[GaryCrow]

I was stationed in Northern Italy for a while. You don’t want to end up in an Italian hospital, their health care system is third world. I have a friend that had a medical emergency in Paris and had to be admitted to a French hospital, he said it was a horror show so I don’t think they’re much better than the Italians.

Someone that’s used to U.S. medical care is going to be shocked if they end up in a European hospital. The only people that think socialized medicine is a good thing are those that don’t know any better.

[Zhang Fei]

[I believe northern Italy had many come/return from China - workers in their garment industry - just prior to the outbreak. Geneva did not have the same traffic.]

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Illegal aliens don’t go back home, because they can’t afford the passage back to Italy, which costs tens of thousands of dollars through the human smuggling network, since garment workers don’t have the assets to qualify for a visa. There are very few legal Chinese aliens in Italy, because they really don’t grant residency to foreigners without genetic or marital ties to the country. A more likely source is Chinese tourists, millions of whom visited Italy in 2019:

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https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/travel-leisure/article/3041561/why-chinese-tourists-love-italys-quaint-rural-villages
[According to Italian tourism authorities, roughly 3.5 million Chinese travellers had visited Italy this year by the end of October.]

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Roughly half that number of Chinese tourists visited the US in 2019:

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https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-china-travel/chinese-travel-to-us-shrinks-47-in-first-nine-months-of-2019-idUSL3N25W2OE
[The National Travel & Tourism Office, which works with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to release arrival data, said the number of business travelers had fallen 3.7% to 275,888 from the same period a year ago, while those traveling for leisure sank 6.5% to about 1.6 million. ]

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Tourists are a wonderful thing for host country economies, but some of the luggage they bring with them isn’t necessarily benign or even visible.

[Hillarys Gate Cult]

I heard that Italy had average of 7 flights a day to Wuhan, China.

[Hillarys Gate Cult]

When Wuhan went under quarantine, China kept departing international flights from Wuhan going for days.

[cloudmountain]

One of the MAIN reasons that Italy got hit so bad with COVID-19 is that they hired THOUSANDS of Chinese-cheap- labor to work in Italy.

Some of those Chinese workers took COVID-19 to Italy.
Sfortuna!

[livius]

Good article. Rarely do I see it mentioned that Italian health care was basically bad even before the flu, and that the glories of socialized medicine account for their high death rate and continuing problems. The same is true, only to a slightly lesser degree, of Spain.

[mosesdapoet]

The way this whole thing developed starting with the Italian fashion industry areas controlled by the Chinese commies hit by a runaway CCWV (Chinese Communist Wuhan Virus) breakout occurred in Wuhan the politburo closed off Wuhan but did not warn the Italian Socialist government or the Pope with whom the Chinese government had good relations with.

But certainly violated that understanding when the socialists should have been informed and allowed to deny those Chinese workers who replaced Italians in those factories taken over by the Chinese travel to and from China particularly for their New Year while this was occurring.