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Italy you can maybe excuse that they were caught by surprise, but yes, the other countries in Europe handled it badly initially. The surprising thing about the

Italy you can maybe excuse that they were caught by surprise, but yes, the other countries in Europe handled it badly initially. The surprising thing about the US is that somehow it's handling it worse.

makomk 6y ago
From what I can tell, Italy being caught by surprise was a largely self-inflicted problem - they seem to have not tested any patients who were hospitalized with potential symptoms unless they'd travelled to China or had contact with someone who had. Other countries like the US had testing policies that, on paper, excluded those patients but in reality they did get tested anyway often enough that community spread was detected relatively early on. Italy only spotted theirs when someone happened to be hospitalized who'd had contact with a person that'd travelled to China but hadn't caught it from them. This is very different from the narrative the American and British press have been pushing, probably for political reasons - in that narrative Italy was just unlucky, and it was the other countries that didn't learn from them and stop themselves following in Italy's footsteps that failed. That doesn't seem to match reality. As best I can tell, Italy screwed up so badly that they doomed not only themselves, but any hope of containing Covid-19 in Europe and America. Everywhere else seems to have done a reasonably good job of stopping it coming from China, and it was the unexpected, undetected cases from Italy when they claimed to be completely clean that caused the outbreaks.
- QuesnayJr 6y ago
  But the rest of Europe stood around, slack-jawed, while things spiraled out of control in Italy. I live in a different European country, and the lead-up to the COVID crisis was like watching a someone being chased down by a snail -- the only reason the snail caught them was because they didn't bother to move out of the way. For example, people were regularly traipsing off to the Italy for vacation up until the point when things started to spin out of control and they shut the country down.

makomk 6y ago

From what I can tell, Italy being caught by surprise was a largely self-inflicted problem - they seem to have not tested any patients who were hospitalized with potential symptoms unless they'd travelled to China or had contact with someone who had. Other countries like the US had testing policies that, on paper, excluded those patients but in reality they did get tested anyway often enough that community spread was detected relatively early on. Italy only spotted theirs when someone happened to be hospitalized who'd had contact with a person that'd travelled to China but hadn't caught it from them. This is very different from the narrative the American and British press have been pushing, probably for political reasons - in that narrative Italy was just unlucky, and it was the other countries that didn't learn from them and stop themselves following in Italy's footsteps that failed. That doesn't seem to match reality. As best I can tell, Italy screwed up so badly that they doomed not only themselves, but any hope of containing Covid-19 in Europe and America. Everywhere else seems to have done a reasonably good job of stopping it coming from China, and it was the unexpected, undetected cases from Italy when they claimed to be completely clean that caused the outbreaks.

QuesnayJr 6y ago
But the rest of Europe stood around, slack-jawed, while things spiraled out of control in Italy. I live in a different European country, and the lead-up to the COVID crisis was like watching a someone being chased down by a snail -- the only reason the snail caught them was because they didn't bother to move out of the way. For example, people were regularly traipsing off to the Italy for vacation up until the point when things started to spin out of control and they shut the country down.