Italy: First response is to put the patient on a ventilator.
USA: Last response is to put the patient on a ventilator.
Occam’s Razor?
To be fair, Italy got hit a lot sooner than we did and the generally cramped living conditions in Europe means that that crap spread like wildfire. US cities are generally not so close quarters and suburbs even less so. We don’t use mass transit like Europe does either. The ones that are more dense and do use public transport extensively were far more likely to get hammered, and cities like NYC did.
Italy didn’t get the advantage of as much lead time as we did, and they weren’t paying much attention, unlike our President. They probably initially dismissed what they were seeing as just a bad flu season, not the ‘Chinese virus’... only to find out to their horror that it wasn’t when people started having respiratory failure.
Italy also has a much higher percentage of elderly than we do, and their elderly are generally more fragile than ours are (for various reasons that would take forever to go into, even before we talk about their socialized medical system). They *may* have had so many people decaying so quickly that they may not have had a choice.