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[I saw a report that the Lombardi region has ~350,000 Chinese population, and that the CV is still mostly within that population group.

Anyone find any English confirmation for that report? Would love to know if most of the deaths are Chinese surnames, or if the Chinese simply don’t report into the local press.]

Someone suggested that ethnicity was being withheld as a means of preventing prejudice against the Chinese nationals in the population. If so, I’m not sure why the authorities are so sensitive about it - it’s a given that the source of the original bug is ultimately Chinese even if Patient Zero is allegedly a German national. But whatever the medium of transmission, the origin obviously lies somewhere in China.

If they’re obscuring it to deceive Italians into thinking that the vast majority of the victims are ethnic Chinese, thereby sparking sympathy instead of anger at that community, word of mouth alone should give the lie to that attempt at myth-making. Then there are the vastly expanded obituary sections in Italian language Italian newspapers, a story also covered by WaPo:

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/coronavirus-obituaries-pages-italian-newspaper-21696391
[”This is the daily newspaper of Bergamo, one of the epidemic hotspot in Italy,” a Twitter caption to the footage read.

“On Febrary 9th, obituaries occupied 1.5 pages.

“On March 13th, the paper printed 10 (!!) pages of obituaries.]

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.

A footnote - not everyone has living relatives willing to pony up for an obituary. And of those who do pay up, presumably not everyone does so in that particular daily. So the obituary expansion in this particular Italian paper is probably not all-inclusive of the extraordinary death toll from this virus.

2nd footnote - if this bug is just the flu, the question is why the obituaries went from 1.5 pages to 10. We’d have to assume that survivors of the coronavirus dead are much more into paying for obituaries than the relatives of people who died from the flu.

"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."

Strongly disagree.

A) The Chinese don't do obits.

B) No one in Italy is going to ship a freshly dead Chinese full of Corona back to Wuhan, into the fires they go.