The world average Corona fatality rate (deaths/total cases) as on 17th Mar 2020 was 4%, while for Italy, it was 8%.
Such high fatality in Italy has demographic, cultural, lifestyle and economic reasons.
Reason 1 (Demographic): It has the world’s 2nd highest 65+ years population.
23% of Italy’s population is 65+ years old; this is 2nd only to Japan which is at 26%; most of the deaths reported are for 65+ people.
Reason 2 (Cultural): Italy’s young tend to spend significant time with the elderly.
The young stay with their parents and grandparents, especially in rural areas but travel to urban, highly populated areas and likely get affected and transfer infection (symptoms in young appear late, so they do the damage before they know themselves).
Reason 3 (Lifestyle): Italy has a significant smoking population.
24% of Italy smokes; this makes the aged smoking population even more vulnerable.
Reason 4 (Economic): Italy signed up for China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative in March 2019.
OBOR is China’s foreign policy play aligned with its ambitious dream of becoming the most influential country.
Under OBOR, China invests in a country (which more often than not happens to be financially distressed) for infrastructure development.
So, Chinese companies and suppliers with Chinese employees get contracts and China gets access to strategic locations & assets, which the country has to handover to offset debt.
Italy had seen 3 recessions between 2009-2019; its unemployment was over 10% when in March 2019, it became the perfect country for China to exploit and get signed up for OBOR .
Most of the investments happened in Lombardy and Tuscany regions and in Feb 2020, the first Coronavirus (from Wuhan) case was reported in the Lombardy region, which is the most-affected region in Italy today.
Because of OBOR and trade relations, the air connections between Italy and China have tripled in the last one year.
The important point to note is that none of the reasons apply ‘only’ to Italy, e.g. Japan has more 65+ people, India has more people staying with parents, 40+ countries have smoking populations higher than that of Italy and 78 countries are signed up for OBOR , but the combination of reasons is quite unusual and therefore lethal.
