Riddle me this

[evertonfc]

Why does this virus seem to be spreading so fast in first world countries? You don't hear as much about Latin America

[intrepidity]

1. It will nt

[SCantiGOP]

2. they probably have very limited testing ability

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. Less international travel.

Note: Closing borders only works if done very early AND only with strenuous followup on all cases including detailed and comprehensive contact checks.

[defacto7]

4. They probably don't have the resources or political will

to deal with it. My speculation.

[MineralMan]

5. You don't hear because no attention is being paid to those countries.

You will hear, though. Iran, apparently, is having a very tough time with COVID-19,

It could be having a disastrous effect in some countries, but without any news coverage at all.

We'll see.

[dewsgirl]

6. If I have learned one thing from this mess 90 percent

of these governments are not honest, some more so, some less so. The movie Contagion may have got a lot of things right, down to the Forsythia "cure"=Colloidal Silver. They missed all the deception amongst world governments.

[stillcool]

7. hopefully, it won't be their turn...

although, I'm not so sure what constitutes a first world country.
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

[OnDoutside]

8. It was the Northern Italy spread that is the most puzzling. There's a

suggestion that because that area has a huge textile industry, and well in excess of 100,000 Chinese workers in this area of Italy, workers brought it back with them after Christmas and up to the Chinese New Year.

There is an excellent article in the New Yorker from 2 years ago, about the tension between locals and the Chinese immigrants. I'll try find and add it here.

[defacto7]

10. If that's true, it just is what it is. But I hope it doesn't become

just another way to blame "the Chinese". It would be more likely one of the many unfortunate situations that was unavoidable.

[OnDoutside]

12. Well said. This New Yorker piece is the background to those Chinese workers being in the Milan area

Italy has had a long, unhealthy link to racism & fascism (Google Lazio & fascism)

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.”

SNIP

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.”

SNIP

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.

After Italy became a unified nation, in 1861, Massimo d’Azeglio, a Piedmontese statesman and novelist, is said to have commented, “Now that there is an Italy, it will be necessary to make the Italians.” But, until recently, few people had thought about how to make a hyphenated Italian. During one of the raids, I asked an Italian official who was there to translate Mandarin why there weren’t more Chinese Pratan translators. If there were, I suggested, the mill workers might be more responsive to questions, and would not be able to talk to one another privately by switching to the Wenzhou dialect, which not even Mandarin speakers understand. She answered, brightly, “Because we’re Italians! ” Tuscans may fantasize about walling themselves off from the forces of globalism, but, as the Chinese-Italian economic relationship grows ever more complex, the illusion is getting harder to maintain. The per-capita income in Wenzhou is now more than a hundred times what it was when the migration to Prato began. As a result, wage expectations in the Chinese factories in Prato are increasing. Meanwhile, the travel agent Armando Chang told me, the Chinese “are no longer coming in the same numbers.” Some are even returning to Wenzhou from Prato. “You can make more money back home,” Enrico said. He told me that, partly because of rising salaries in Wenzhou, he paid his Chinese manager more than he would pay an Italian.

Well worth reading the full article.


https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-chinese-workers-who-assemble-designer-bags-in-tuscany

[dalton99a]

13. +1

[Brainfodder]

9. Can't report what you can't confirm 100% yet, maybe?

Around 200 countries, how many have testing at all, let alone readiness?

[defacto7]

11. Few