Why is Italy In So Much Trouble? – It’s More Than ICU Beds

American Thinker ^ | 03/23/2020 | Brian Joondeph

[SeekAndFind]

Watching cable news these days, it is difficult to know which is greater, the rise in Chinese Coronavirus cases worldwide or the panic and sense of doom for those unable to work, travel, or freely associate with others.

The media is in overdrive, under the journalistic principle of, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Predictions of an exponential rise in illnesses and hospitalizations are a cable news staple this week, with many reports suggesting America is just a few weeks behind Italy.

Rather than offering calm, USA Today warned, “Too many coronavirus patients, too few ventilators: Outlook in US could get bad, quickly.”

Referring to Italy they report, “Italy’s hospitals are choosing who gets lifesaving breathing machines and who does not.” In other words, death panels and rationing.

This is what’s ahead for the US they claim, even without Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare-For-All” scheme. “US hospitals are on the cusp of too many severely ill patients without enough intensive care unit beds and ventilators to keep those patients breathing,” warns USA Today.

What is left out of the story is why Italy has so many cases of a Chinese virus. If calling the virus “Chinese Coronavirus” or the “Wuhan virus” is deemed racist, despite a long tradition of naming infectious diseases based on their origin, we can call it the “Belt and Road virus”.

A Chinese newspaper headline from last year makes the connection, “Italy aims to develop closer trade ties with China through Belt and Road.” Business ties between Italy and China provided not just a road, but a superhighway for the Coronavirus to travel from Wuhan to Milan. How’s that globalism working out?

The world has luxury handbags and clothes with labels from Gucci and Prada, but Italy has Chinese workers manufacturing those items, and now a deadly virus.

[1Old Pro]

Italy has Chinese workers manufacturing those items, and now a deadly virus

Open borders and "diversity" kills.

[Brian Griffin]

Eastern France also has been hard hit.

It’s probably more deadly in Italy because Italy has a shortage of children, who tend to get coronavirus colds and give them to adults who then develop coronavirus resistance.

[Dr. Pritchett]

Compare the areas of the worst breakouts in Italy and Iran with the areas of China’s One Belt and Road Initiative. China is AT WAR with the west whether we want to acknowledge it or not. They are AT WAR in cyber, diplomatic, information, and economic domains and they’d prefer we pretend they’re not.

[SeekAndFind]

FROM PJ MEDIA:

There was a story yesterday asking this very question in The Telegraph.

They identified several things that might be contributing to this:

• Demographics: Italy is, on average, a country full of old people. According to the CIA World Factbook, Italy is the fifth-oldest country in the world. We know that COVID-19 is more likely to cause death in older people.

• Comorbidity, that is, association with other diseases: Italy's aging population, as well as being old, also has lots of old people with heart disease, COPD, long histories of smoking, high blood pressure, and diabetes.

• There's a geographic factor here as well: most of the deaths are coming from heavily industrial Lombardy, which also has a long history of bad air pollution.

• The most interesting one is that the Italian National Institute of Health thinks the cause of death is being over-identified as COVID-19.

This one is sure to start an argument in the comments, but here's the direct quote:

“On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity - many had two or three."

And, of course, there's another point: people in Italy apparently really didn't want to be accused of being racist and so didn't respond quickly. At the same time, the Chinese government was busily encouraging Italians to hug Chinese people to fight racism.

So here's the question: how do you decide which cases should be counted as COVID-19 deaths? And are Italian doctors being overaggressive with cause of death or not?

As always with this sort of thing, the question is which way to bet. That's the best you can do. The way to bet here is that it's a combination of demographics, smoking, pollution, and over-diagnosis.

Make of that what you will.

Guessing that Italy represents the way the United States is going to go is not nearly as good a bet, though; we're on average younger, fewer of us smoke, and our population is more spread out.

[griswold3]

Let us discuss the prognosis of those put on ventilators.
Age, comorbidity factors can have poor outcomes.

[Varda]

I’d say it’s two fold. First, the Italians stopped having children which left a society going extinct. And two, they don’t seem to be quickly adaptable.

America is neither of those things. The auto companies are turning quickly to manufacture ventilators. It reminds me of WW2 when auto companies retooled and started turning out machines of war.

[wastoute]

One thing that occurs to me is it certainly is not correct for a hospital to bill a patient their “usual and customary fee” when during the next week NO ONE in a hospital will receive “usual and customary” service.

[neverevergiveup]

“It’s probably more deadly in Italy because Italy has a shortage of children, who tend to get coronavirus colds and give them to adults who then develop coronavirus resistance.”

That’s an interesting theory, that makes sense. Unfortunately, only about 15% of ‘colds’ are because of coronavirus.

[atc23]

Direct flights from Wuhan to Milan? That’s not good. The article even states that authorities have traced Patient #1 to a couple from Wuhan who later were diagnosed with C19 long ago - infecting potentially thousands or millions of Italians

[miss marmelstein]

My parents always spoke about how quickly we turned auto plants into weapons plants. And as kids, we watched grainy newsreels about it, were told by Veronica Lake not to get your hair caught in machinery and watched black and white movies that used these factories as sets (I'm thinking of Hitchcock's Saboteur). I doubt any of the idiots at CNN are aware of what Americans can do in a pinch because they know no history. As an aside, I also imagine Italian unions in factories in the north are pieces of work.

[jz638]

My parents always spoke about how quickly we turned auto plants into weapons plants

Factories in your parents' generation are a lot different than factories today. In some parts of the factory, there's no possibility of adjusting work because of hard tooling and fixed setups. In some other parts of a factory, it's a matter of reprogramming a machine, which takes seconds to do, but maybe weeks to get a design in place. The hardest bit would be sourcing the component parts that would be needed. A 1940's car and a 1940's airplane used roughly the same types of parts. A 2020's car uses a lot of custom molded plastic, pre programmed circuit boards, and preassembled mechanical bits from factories in China. The factories are streamlined to make their products efficiently, and if they make a different product, they're usually retooled from top to bottom. It's not impossible to change products, but it's not a snap of the fingers.

[CharlesWayneCT]

They had a “hug a chinese” day.

[miss marmelstein]

Well, we shall see. I suspect you could hear people say what you’re saying in 1941.

[Varda]

America didn't have a modern army at the beginning of WW2. My FIL was recruited to train recruits on horseback. I recall reading that there were extremely low numbers of NCOs. We almost started from scratch.

[Varda]

One of the CEO’s said that ventilators could be manufactured from the process that makes auto air filtration systems. Trump has already loosened in the federal specs so that could happen quickly.

[Covenantor]

re: WWII factories.

The key factor in Henry Ford’s success was the developement of the moving assembly line, where workers remained in a static location adding parts to the auto frames which moved slowly on conveyor lines. The added parts were created elsewhere in the vast Ford Motors complex or at out side supplier manufacturing shops/plants.

Assembly line production today remains the same in principle just with better tools and controls, robots replacing humans in some task but the conveyor keeps moving. The logistics of controlling arrival, stacking points, and distribution of parts and assemblies to assembly points becomes a complex choreographic excercise.

So using an automobile assembly line to produce an item better suited for bench assemby (which is merely a schematic miniature version of the car assembly line) simply because of scale.

In other words the idle car/truck assembly plants are ill suited for transformation to respirator assemnly...plus unions, negotiations with whom would be protracted thievery.

[miss marmelstein]

Do we have unions anymore? I haven’t heard a peep out of them in years...

[miss marmelstein]

Which simply reconfirms my opinion that Americans are adaptable and quickly adaptable. Perhaps the Italians are not.

[Covenantor]

You’re in the theater biz and asking me about unions?

LOL !