Could This Explain Why the Coronavirus Death Rate in Italy is so High?

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Thanks for the explanation.

There is a lot of misinformation regarding Italy on this thread. What I haven’t seen mentioned is the fact that the U.S. and European fashion industry has for years been using thousands of Chinese laborers shipped to sweatshops in the areas around Milan to produce clothing and shoes, some of it high end.

This “arrangement” allows the industry to attach the label “Made in Italy” to these products even though there are no longer any Italian artisans involved in the process as was once the case.

This has been a premium selling point for the fashion industry.

The Chinese laborers live in Italy and periodically travel back and forth between China and Italy. This has been going on for years and is what has made up the bulk of the Coronavirus cases in Italy.

The dirty little secret that continues to be under reported. Bottom line this problem arose due in large part to maximization of profit by Western business owners.

Are illegal Chinese Workers, the ones dying in Italy?

The Chinese Workers Who Assemble Designer Bags in Tuscany
Many companies are using inexpensive immigrant labor to manufacture handbags that bear the coveted “Made in Italy” label.

The World of Fashion April 16, 2018 Issue
By D. T. Max

April 9, 2018
The Chinese residents of Prato have arguably revived the fading manufacturing city which has the highest proportion of...The Chinese residents of Prato have arguably revived the fading manufacturing city, which has the highest proportion of immigrants in Italy.Illustration by Emiliano Ponzi

The first significant wave of Chinese immigrants arrived in the industrial zone around Prato, a city fifteen miles northwest of Florence, in the nineteen-nineties. Nearly all of them came from Wenzhou, a port city south of Shanghai. For the Chinese, the culture shock was more modest than one might have expected. “The Italians were friendly,” one early arrival remembered. “Like the Chinese, they called one another Uncle. They liked family.”

In Tuscany, business life revolved around small, interconnected firms, just as it did in Wenzhou, a city so resolutely entrepreneurial that it had resisted Mao’s collectivization campaign.

The Prato area was a hub for mills and workshops, some of which made clothes and leather goods for the great fashion houses. If you were willing to be paid off the books, and by the piece, Prato offered plenty of opportunities. Many Wenzhouans found jobs there. “The Italians, being canny, would subcontract out their work to the Chinese,” Don Giovanni Momigli, a priest whose parish, near Prato, included an early influx of Chinese, told me. “Then, they were surprised when the Chinese began to do the work on their own.”

By the mid-nineties, Wenzhouans were setting up textile businesses in small garages, where they often also lived. Soon, they began renting empty workshops, paying with cash. The authorities didn’t ask too many questions. Prato’s business model was falling apart under the pressures of globalization.

As it became harder for Italians to make a living in manufacturing, some of them welcomed the money that the Chinese workers brought into the local economy. If you could no longer be an artisan, you could still be a landlord.

Throughout the aughts, Chinese continued to show up in Tuscany. A non-stop flight was established between Wenzhou and Rome. Some migrants came with tourist visas and stayed on. Others paid smugglers huge fees, which they then had to work off, a form of indentured servitude that was enforced by the threat of violence. The long hours that the Chinese worked astonished many Italians, who were used to several weeks of paid vacation a year and five months of maternity leave. In 1989, the newspaper Corriere della Sera, using racist language still common among some Italians, published an article about a Chinese worker under the headline “yellow stakhanovite on the arno.”

While Florence was celebrated for its premium leatherwork, Prato was best known for the production of textiles. The Wenzhou workers tacked in a third direction. They imported cheap cloth from China and turned it into what is now called pronto moda, or “fast fashion”: polyester shirts, plasticky pants, insignia jackets. These items sold briskly to low-end retailers and in open-air markets throughout the world.

The Chinese firms gradually expanded their niche, making clothes for middle-tier brands, like Guess and American Eagle Outfitters. And in the past decade they have become manufacturers for Gucci, Prada, and other luxury-fashion houses, which use often inexpensive Chinese-immigrant labor to create accessories and expensive handbags that bear the coveted “Made in Italy” label. Many of them are then sold to prosperous consumers in Shanghai and Beijing. It’s not just Italian brands that have profited from this cross-cultural arrangement: a Chinese leather-goods entrepreneur I recently met with just outside Prato was wearing a forty-thousand-dollar Bulgari watch.

More than ten per cent of Prato’s two hundred thousand legal residents are Chinese. According to Francesco Nannucci, the head of the police’s investigative unit in Prato, the city is also home to some ten thousand Chinese people who are there illegally.

Prato is believed to have the second-largest Chinese population of any European city, after Paris, and it has the highest proportion of immigrants in Italy, including a large North African population.

Many locals who worked in the textile and leather industries resented the Chinese immigrants, complaining that they cared only about costs and speed, not about aesthetics, and would have had no idea how to make fine clothes and accessories if not for the local craftsmen who taught them. Simona Innocenti, a leather artisan, told me that her husband was forced out of bag-making by cheaper Chinese competitors. She said of the newcomers, “They copy, they imitate. They don’t do anything original. They’re like monkeys.”

“I hate to spoil your porridge, but your son has a blonde in his room.”

Although it could be argued that the Chinese have revived Prato’s manufacturing industry, there has been a backlash against them. Native residents have accused Chinese immigrants of bringing crime, gang warfare, and garbage to the city. Chinese mill owners, they complain, ignore health laws and evade taxes; they use the schools and the hospitals without contributing money for them.

In the early nineties, a group of Italians who worked in areas with a high concentration of immigrants sent an open letter to the Chinese government, sarcastically demanding citizenship: “We are six hundred honest workers who feel as if we were already citizens of your great country.”

The strangest accusation was that the Chinese in Tuscany weren’t dying—or, at least, that they weren’t leaving any bodies behind. In 1991, the regional government began an investigation into why, during the previous twelve months, not a single Chinese death had been officially recorded in Prato or in two nearby towns.

In 2005, the government was still mystified—that year, more than a thousand Chinese arrivals were registered, and only three deaths. Locals suspected that Chinese mobsters were disposing of corpses in exchange for passports, which they then sold to new arrivals, a scheme that took advantage of the native population’s apparent inability to tell any one Chinese person from another.

There was a note of jealousy to the Pratans’ complaints, as well as a reluctant respect for people who had beaten them at their own game. Elizabeth Krause, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has written about the changes in Prato. She told me, “While I was there, people would say to me, ‘Eravamo noi i cinesi’ ”—“We were the Chinese.”

Even as many Italians maintained a suspicion of Chinese immigrants, they still criticized them for not contributing fully to the wider economy. Innocenti, the leather artisan, claimed that “the Chinese don’t even go to the store here. They have a van that goes from factory to factory, selling Band-Aids, tampons, and chicken. And in the back of the van they have a steamer with rice.”

The under-the-table cash economy of Prato’s Chinese factories has facilitated tax evasion. Last year, as the result of an investigation by the Italian finance ministry into five billion dollars’ worth of questionable money transfers, the Bank of China, whose Milan branch had reportedly been used for half of them, paid a settlement of more than twenty million dollars. Many of the transfers, the authorities said, represented undeclared income from Chinese-run businesses, or money generated by the counterfeiting of Italian fashion goods.

In Italy, these sorts of investigations are often more show than substance, and many Chinese residents see themselves as convenient targets. “We didn’t invent this way of doing business,” one mill owner pointed out to me. “If you go south from Rome, you’ll find people who are a lot worse than the Chinese.” He speculated that some Italians disliked the Chinese for working harder than they did, and for succeeding.

In the Prato area, some six thousand businesses are registered to Chinese citizens. Francesco Xia, a real-estate agent who heads a social organization for young Chinese-Italians, said, “The Chinese feel like the Jews of the thirties. Prato is a city that had a big economic crisis, and now there’s a nouveau-riche class of Chinese driving fancy cars, spending money in restaurants, and dressing in the latest fashions. It’s a very dangerous situation.”

At a time when Europe is filled with anti-immigrant rhetoric, political extremists have pointed to the demographic shifts in Prato as proof that Italy is under siege. In February, Patrizio La Pietra, a right-wing senator, told a Prato newspaper that the city needed to confront “Chinese economic illegality,” and that the underground economy had “brought the district to its knees, eliminated thousands of jobs, and exposed countless families to hunger.”

Such assertions have been effective: in Italy’s recent national elections, Tuscany, which since the end of the Second World War had consistently supported leftist parties, gave twice as many votes to right-wing and populist parties as it did to those on the left. Giovanni Donzelli, a member of the quasi-Fascist Fratelli d’Italia party, who last month was elected a national representative, told me, “The Chinese have their own restaurants and their own banks—even their own police force. You damage the economy twice.

Once, because you compete unfairly with the other businesses in the area, and the second time because the money doesn’t go back into the Tuscan economic fabric.” He added that he had once tried to talk with some Chinese parents at his children’s school. “They had been here six or seven years, and they still didn’t speak Italian,” he scoffed. “Because they didn’t need to!”

Prato’s centro storico is a picturesque maze of streets paved with flagstones and bordered by walls that date to the early Renaissance. One Sunday in February, when I visited, many locals were doing what Italians call le vasche (“laps”), walking from one end of the district to the other, occasionally pausing to look in shopwindows. Some were on their way to family lunches, carrying plates of biscotti wrapped in shiny paper stamped with the names of the city’s best bakeries. The Duomo has superb frescoes by Fra Filippo Lippi—“The most excellent of all his works,” according to Vasari—and a gold-and-glass reliquary that holds what is claimed to be the sacred girdle of Mary. In a sense, it is Prato’s original textile.

Just outside the city walls, in Prato’s Chinatown, well-to-do Chinese families were carrying their own wrapped parcels of sweets: mashed-taro buns, red-bean cakes. Suburbanites, coming into town to see relatives, drove BMWs, Audis, and Mercedeses. (In a telling remark, more than one Italian insisted to me that no Chinese person would be caught in a Fiat Panda, one of the Italian company’s most modest cars.) According to a 2015 study by a regional economic agency, Chinese residents contribute more than seven hundred million euros to Prato’s provincial economy, about eleven per cent of its total.

Chinatown, though, looked dishevelled. In the alleyways, I saw that many of the windows were covered with blankets. A few days later, I accompanied authorities on several raids and learned that there were sweatshops behind some of those windows. In rooms without heat, the newest and poorest arrivals, many of them undocumented, sat bent over sewing machines, tacking collars onto shirts or affixing brightly colored stripes to jogging pants. Such pants might sell to retailers for about eight euros—a fifth of what they would cost if they were made legally by Italians.

The clothing-manufacturing operations in Chinatown tend to be small scale. After visiting the centro storico, I drove through the areas around Prato. I passed block after block of businesses with Chinese characters next to English phrases: Normcore, Feel Good, Miss & Yes. Giant, low-slung buildings combined manufacturing areas with showrooms where buyers could examine samples and place orders. Jessica Moloney, a London-born brand consultant and agent for importers, explained to me, “If you’ve got three to six months to wait and you need five hundred to a thousand pieces, you go to China. But if you have only two weeks and need a hundred pieces, you come to Prato.” She noted, “TJ Maxx is everywhere here. I don’t know anyone who isn’t working with them.”

The word prato means “meadow,” and even here, amid structures that evoked the sprawl outside an airport, there were green spaces. In June of 2016, in one of the grassy squares bordered by cluster pines, Chinese locals held a violent protest, after two and a half years of mounting tensions.

In 2013, an electrical short had caused a fire that destroyed a workshop called Teresa Moda, killing seven Chinese workers. The victims had both worked and slept in the buildings. One had died while trying to squeeze through a barred window. “I could hear the cries of the Chinese inside,” an off-duty carabiniere who battled the fire told Corriere della Sera.

After the fire, the Prato authorities, with no small amount of condescension, said they’d made up their minds that they could no longer neglect the strangers living among them. They would offer Chinese immigrants the blessings of workplace protections, legal wages, and sanitary standards. Italian officials did a sweep of the Prato area, and discovered a great many unregistered mills. Between 2014 and 2017, they conducted inspections of more than eight thousand Chinese-run businesses. They knocked on the doors of mills at night and without warning, before owners could clean up, or close, or reopen down the street under a new name. Officially, the raids, part of a program called Lavoro Sicuro (“Safe Workplace”), were not focussed on any ethnicity.

Everyone called them “the Chinese raids,” including one of the architects of the plan, Renzo Berti, the director of the disease-prevention unit at the central-Tuscany department of health. Berti told me that the effort had improved the working conditions in the Chinese-owned mills. When the raids started, he said, ninety-three per cent of the inspected businesses were committing violations, from illegal dormitories to exposed wiring. Now the rate was thirty-five per cent. “This has been like a steamroller,” he said. “We are having our effect.”

The Italians have also cracked down on crime in the Chinese community. In January, the police arrested Zhang Naizhong, the alleged kingpin of the Chinese-Italian mafia, which, they said, had a large presence in Prato. Francesco Nannucci, of the Prato investigative unit, told me that Zhang was the padrino—the godfather. He added, with a laugh, “They learned their structure from the Italians.” (The Italian Mob is also active in Prato, but Nannucci said that the two groups don’t interact.) Nannucci estimates that eighty per cent of the city’s Chinese mills paid protection money to Zhang’s organization, which was also involved in drugs, prostitution, and gambling. (A recent pretrial tribunal cast doubt on the evidence, though Zhang remains under house arrest.)

Before arresting Zhang, Nannucci said, police had followed him from Rome to Prato. He changed cars eight times along the way, to thwart efforts to track him; visited a restaurant, where local Chinese businessmen lined up at his table and bowed; and was eventually arrested at a hotel in Prato. Nannucci was pleased with the operation, but disappointed that he’d received little help from the Chinese Pratans. “There’s a lot of omertà,” he said.

The Chinese see the raids and Zhang’s arrest primarily as harassment. One Chinese mill owner even pulled out a gun when police officers came to inspect his building. (The gun turned out to be fake.) Armando Chang, who owns a travel agency in the Prato area, told me, “When the Italians do an investigation, the ugly thing, in my opinion, is that they first develop a theory, then try to find the facts that go with it.” He claimed that he’d never even heard of a local Chinese mafia. “I learned about them from Bruce Lee movies,” he said. “But I’ve never seen them here.” A group of Chinese professionals told me it wasn’t a coincidence that the number of raids had increased during the run-up to the national elections.

During a raid in June of 2016, an elderly Chinese man got into an altercation with a carabiniere while trying to leave the mill where he worked. The man, who was carrying an infant, was reportedly jostled, and the baby fell and was injured. Word spread on social media, and several hundred Chinese soon gathered in the square, shouting and throwing rocks and bottles. Police put down the protest, and the regional government promised more raids. At that point, the Chinese foreign ministry stepped in and gently warned the Italians not to pick on its citizens. (Nearly all Chinese-born Pratans remain citizens of China.)

The two sides promised to work together, but tensions remain high. Luca Zhou, the head of the Italian branch of Ramunion, a Chinese charity, said, “They rent us the factories, but they don’t want to communicate with us. We need more friendship. We should be like brothers.”

Italy also has a huge Chinese labor force who churn out fashions in Italian factories.

The Mayor of Florence (right) held a "Hug a Chinese Day."

MARCH 21, 2020---An Italian virologist says political correctness doomed his country's coronavirus response.

The City of Florence may have exacerbated the contagion when the uber-liberal mayor launched a 'Hug a Chinese Day' .......
calculatedly held after Trump announced China travel restrictions

“It’s the sauseech and a the Braciole. “

Great, now you’re making me hungry.

Well technically, not many people die from the flu. They get pneumonia from having the flu and then die yet they go into flu death stats. Bottom line is, most of those people in Italy wouldn’t be dead no if there was no chinavirus.

Nailed.

Socialistic health care where people wait in lines or for hours to weeks. Italy is rated #2 in the world in healthcare according to??? WHO. USA is ranked 37th lowest of any industrialized nation.

http://news.law.wfu.edu/2009/10/health-care-expert-compares-italian-health-care-system-with-u-s-2/

Let’s see what Pierre, Hillaryous and Barry have to say.

Interesting. The number of deaths on a ‘typical’ day in Italy is about 1,800.

So, Italy has the following issues:

1. Aged population
2. socialized medicine care and all that entails
3. Cultural closeness

However, their death rates for influenza, lung cancer and pneumonia and asthma are lower than USA and most of Europe.

The context is helpful but let’s remember any dead from CV is in ADDITION to flu deaths.

Being the same as flu would be doubling of flu deaths.

But because CV in vulnerable patients is 10 times as aggressive as flu, that could mean 10 times the deaths.

Many other reasons to control CV.

Is the virus serious and did everyone overreact? Maybe a bit of both.

It’s like diabetes in the US. Causes of death are recorded as something other than the underlying diabetes.

Exactly. WE DECIDE what to report so that YOU CAN DECIDE. NO further questions...sorry we’ve got to go to a hard break.

“One would only have to look at what is the daily death rate in Italy, before all this started.”

Wow! Very good point,

This is a manifestation of the dangers of a plebiscite democracy which relies on mob rule. Such mob rule is easy to manipulate by govts and media. It is why our Founders created a federated republic. With income taxation and direct election of senators we have moved towards what they feared.

We have to get used to the left wing media’s driving public opinion and mob rule or change it back to the way it was.

One last point- the media do not learn critical thinking nor the scientific method. They learn to create demand for the news to raise their ratings. They learn, then, the criticality of controlling the supply, ie, the content and flow of news. This is a classic case of supply creates demand.

That is why the media can’t be trusted to tell the whole truth, nor can they be trusted to find the truth in the first place. Then, the unhealthy alliance between the media and plebiscite democrats emerges, since both benefit from the same dis-function.

All those prized Made in Italy handbags, shoes and clothing items are now made by imported Chinese labor. Sweatshops abound and many Chinese immigrants have become wealthy enough to travel back to Wuhan for Chinese New Year.

I'm sure that letting families break quarantine to be with their dying relatives has nothing to do with the rapid spread of Wuhan Virus in Italy.

You forgot the "/s"... for those who don't catch your humor...

God forbid wages for the Italian workforce goes up to meet demand. Globalism is the death of everything.

-- ... most customers who shared a reason stated that distrust of government, not fear of the Chi-Com virus ... --

All these "shelter in place" stories. Some people take the WEORDS as they are intended to be used, which is shelter in place. So if the government enforces what they literally said instead of what they meant (restricted contact), the panic buyers are, in their minds, prepared for being sheltered in place.

It’s really difficult to know who to trust on this anymore.

“Ever heard of the FDA?”

The FDA operates under a set of Regulations. Res can be changed or ended as seen fit.

I am quite sure the FDA Authority does not supersede that of the President.