[Pearls Before Swine]

The posted page is blurry. Are most of the people in the obits Chinese or Italian?

I’m not contesting for a moment the upsurge in deaths. I was responding to questions asked about whether the deaths were concentrated in migrant workers or migrant Italians.

And, if my comment on age is wrong... then perhaps my info was based on early comments about a different group of people.

[Zhang Fei]

[Are most of the people in the obits Chinese or Italian?]

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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.