Demographics may help explain the difference.
CHINA:
Age structure
0–14 years: 17.2% (male 127,484,177/female 109,113,241)
15–24 years: 12.8% (male 94,215,607/female 82,050,623)
25–54 years: 48.5% (male 341,466,438/female 327,661,460)
55–64 years: 10.8% (male 74,771,050/female 73,441,177)
65 years and over: 10.8% (male 71,103,029/female 77,995,969) (2017 est.)
Median age
total: 37.4 years Country comparison to the world: 67th
male: 36.5 years
female: 38.4 years (2017 est.)
ITALY:
Age structure
0-14 years: 13.6% (male 4,326,862 /female 4,136,562)
15-24 years: 9.61% (male 2,994,651 /female 2,984,172)
25-54 years: 41.82% (male 12,845,442 /female 13,183,240)
55-64 years: 13.29% (male 4,012,640 /female 4,261,956)
65 years and over: 21.69% (male 5,817,819 /female 7,683,330) (2018 est.)
Median age
total: 45.8 years. Country comparison to the world: 5th
male: 44.7 years
female: 46.9 years (2018 est.)
total: 45.5 years (2017 est.)
men: 44.4 years
women: 46.5 years
total: 44.2 years (2015 est.)
SUMMARY:
1) Italians are on average 8 years older than Chinese.
2) Over 65: Double the number of Italians (22%) are over 65 years of age compared to Chinese (11%). These are the folks most likely to die of Coronavirus.
Oops. Forgot to cite sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Italy#Demographic_statistics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Demographic_statistics
thanks for the %. It should be adjusted re: China, to put a big question mark after the child column.
Reason being, most young people go to cities to become worker drones and leave parents/grandparents back in the village to care for the children. Children are underrepresented in cities as China law says, if children aren’t born in city, then parent has to pay for the child’s city education. If child stays where they are born in rural China (61.9 million of them) then schooling is free. Laborer parents in the city can’t afford to pay, so children are abandoned to grandparents (many of them permanently abandoned). Young couples in China are discouraged from having children simply from the size of apts they are able to rent with their earnings (tiny). This allows the Chinese to artificially represent that child deaths from Wuhan Virus are low to zero because they aren’t counting the rural areas.