With regards to Italy...I am not familiar with their system of healthcare....are their less private practices...doctors/clinics/etc than say the US? Is there more of a reason for people to go and stay at the hospital? I mean we know here that they want you OUT of the hospital as quickly as possible...not sure about any of this in Italy.
I am familiar with it. And I've spent the beginning of the year in the hospital every day for several hours looking after my father until he passed away.
It's a mix between private and public, with the public being run more and more like it was private. And private is still cheaper than in the US. You need to know where to go to get good service, it's a hit and a miss, and not necessarily linked to the practice being private or public.
The real issue is that doctors, nurses and administrators in Italy are...Italian. So you get the super good ones but you also get the super crappy ones, and union regulations do not allow to get rid of the bad ones, especially in the public sector.
I don't believe it is a factor though in this case, looks like the real problem was that the government was more worried at first to not upset the Chinese community asking them to self quarantine, even though it was the Chinese community that went to them first asking to be given guidelines and offering to self quarantine. The main concern of the average politician was being addressed as racist or xenophobe rather than control the virus. When they finally decided to act they issued mild recommendations that the average Italian decided to ignore, like we always do. When the numbers started rising then they decided to issue the equivalent of executive orders and put the place on lock down, too late. Now Italians blame the government for being too late, but they did their (negative) part. That's what I get from the news and speaking daily to my mother, who's 77 and confined to her apartment other than going to buy groceries at the supermarket below her house.
The problem now is that they don't have enough people and equipment to take care of all the cases, plain and simple. The biggest problem apparently being the respirators. And the recovery time being extended and in cases leaving the patient's lung permanently damaged.
I maybe wrong, but if like it seems to be the case the source of the infection hubs in the US is still originating from Wuhan like it was in Europe, the progression in the US would have been much slower (what I mean is that I would expect at least as many people travelling from the Wuhan region to the US as there were travelling to Italy, why so little cases then, I can understand the lack of testing but the death rate would have been noticeable) and whatever measures were taken 'may' have worked so far even though partially. Time will tell, and still we should be careful as individual.
www.cdc.gov
www.theatlantic.com
