Country has highest death toll apart from US; demographics, health care failings, and various political and business interests left Lombardy’s 10 million people terribly vulnerable
ROME (AP) — As Italy prepares to emerge from the West’s first and most extensive coronavirus lockdown, it is increasingly clear that something went terribly wrong in Lombardy, the hardest-hit region in Europe’s hardest-hit country.
Italy had the bad luck of being the first Western nation to be slammed by the outbreak, and its total of 26,000 fatalities lags behind only the US in the global death toll. Italy’s first homegrown case was recorded February 21, at a time when the World Health Organization was still insisting the virus was “containable” and not nearly as infectious as the flu.
But there’s also evidence that demographics and health care deficiencies combined with political and business interests to expose Lombardy’s 10 million people in ways unseen anywhere else, particularly the most vulnerable in nursing homes.
Virologists and epidemiologists say what went wrong there will be studied for years, given how the outbreak overwhelmed a medical system considered one of Europe’s best. In neighboring Veneto, the impact was significantly more controlled.
Prosecutors are deciding whether to lay any criminal blame for the hundreds of dead in nursing homes, many of whom aren’t even counted in Lombardy’s official death toll of 13,269.
Eh? Where they chose to bring it into Italy, in the north with Europe’s largest demographic of older people, pensioner, and elderly, AND 5G like that had in wooo-hun… and they wonder why it sent badly? Are they as bad at data analysis as Americans and Canadians?