Posted on 03/21/2020 4:57:40 PM PDT by Zhang Fei
Italy on Saturday shut all non-essential factories after recording another record coronavirus toll that brought its fatalities to 4,825 - over a third of the world's total and a grim reminder that the pandemic remains out of control.
"The decision taken by the government is to close down all productive activity throughout the territory that is not strictly necessary, crucial, indispensable, to guarantee us essential goods and services," Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said in a dramatic late-night TV address.
The 55-year-old Italian leader stressed that groceries and pharmacies would remain open and did not spell out what "indispensable" companies were.
"We will slow down the country's productive engine, but we will not stop it," Conte said.
Italy has notched a rapid succession of records that seemed unimaginable when a retired Italian builder became the first person in Europe to die of the new illness exactly a month ago.
The Mediterranean nation of 60 million on Thursday overtook China as the global epicentre of COVID-19.
It then registered another 1,420 deaths on Friday and Saturday that took its total higher than that reported by China and third-placed Iran combined.
Medical experts question Iran's transparency and speculate that its toll might be higher.
Italian health officials looked stony-faced as they read out the latest bad news in a daily update on the country's deadliest and most transformative crisis since World War II.
National Health Institute (ISS) chief Silvio Brusaferro urged the elderly to stay in doors at all times because the average age of Italy's victims was 78.5.
"If you do not follow all the (government) measures, you make everything more difficult," Italy's top medical expert said. "If you do, we can make this outbreak slow down."
But the Italian government appears intent on making more or less everyone stay in doors
(Excerpt) Read more at rte.ie ...
Just hug a Chinese and get WOKE and dead...
I thought they did this a week ago
They’re going to run out of people soon.
But flu.
Everyone stocked up on enough food here?
How many dead are Chinese nationals...?
[How many dead are Chinese nationals...?]
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article177744986.html
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/03/02/postulating-covid-19-a-weapon-against-china/
McClatchy is CIA propaganda, you tool.
The death rate in 2018 in Italy was 1,721 persons per day or 628,200 per year from all causes. So why the panic?
[McClatchy is CIA propaganda, you tool.]
BTW, I’ve been following Veterans Today since for almost 20 years, pretty much since the website started up. I posted the McClatchy thing just to provide a 3rd Party assessment. The Oxford academics quoted by McClatchy filled in some of the blanks on where VT got their pre-written essays, many of which had this really foreign-sounding perspective and verbiage.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that Zhang Fei is a reporter for Ireland’s national public broadcaster.
They werent shut down before????
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.