RE: and the way many Italians greet each other.
The Japanese don’t hug each other when they greet. They bow. So do the Koreans. But they also have high infection rates.
But the Japanese and South Koreans didn’t aggressively stop people coming in from China until well after the US banned them at the beginning of February 2020. Fortunately, the disease is starting to fall in South Korea, since it appears the government has gotten its message out for older people to protect themselves more diligently. The same applies for Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, where aggressive government publicity efforts over social networks commonly used in Asia has kept the spread there under control.
Yes but many japanese and koreans live in densely packed areas and in multi-unit buildings, so there’s additional factors to consider.
Both the Italian and Asian societies cited have a large number of households with elderly people living with younger family members. That has impacted the transmission and death rates.
Here, we stash a lot of our old people in quasi-hospitals where we don’t need to think about them and it will be easier to isolate those at most risk... Grandpa may discover that being the forgotten patriarch of his family has a silver lining.
Korea and Japan are very densely populated countries. The US, not so much.
But they tend to be more densely packed together.