COVID-19 exposes EU's inept & clueless leadership

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At least they’re finally reacting. Schengen is shutting down. A little late for containment purposes, but perhaps they will get some breathing room.

Plus the Greeks are actually getting support for keeping the border with Turkey closed. Merkel knows she cannot open the borders again as she did in 2015; there is no mainstream political support for this now. Italy is sending NGO boats back to Libya and no one really says boo.

When they are fighting Covid-19 in their midst, they can’t be dealing with fresh waves of migrants.
 
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Zzyzx_Road said:
At least they’re finally reacting. Schengen is shutting down. A little late for containment purposes, but perhaps they will get some breathing room.
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Europe has over x10 the number of cases and x25 the number of deaths as the USA. We all (outside China) had the same warning this was coming.
 
Theo520 said:
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Zzyzx_Road:
At least they’re finally reacting. Schengen is shutting down. A little late for containment purposes, but perhaps they will get some breathing room.
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Europe has over x10 the number of cases and x25 the number of deaths as the USA. We all (outside China) had the same warning this was coming.
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My understanding is that there are approximately 320 000 Chinese nationals living and working in Italy. Many of those work in the textile industry around Prato, near Florence, Padua and Milan. Italy hosts the largest community of Chinese nationals in all of Europe.
I paesi di cittadinanza più rappresentati sono Marocco (524.775), Albania (502.546), Cina (320.794), Ucraina (233.726) e Filippine (165.783). Tali 5 paesi rappresentano il 45,1% del totale dei cittadini non comunitari presenti.
Source: I cittadini non comunitari regolarmente soggiornanti
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Translated…

The most represented countries of citizenship are Morocco (524,775), Albania (502,546), China (320,794), Ukraine (233,726) and the Philippines (165,783). These 5 countries represent 45.1% of the total number of non-EU citizens present.

Italy also has the third “oldest” population by average age of countries, with
a significant population, in the world — after Japan and Germany. Monaco and Saint Pierre and Miquelon are also higher.

The average American age is 38.1 years compared to Italy at 45.5. That will make a big difference in terms of rates of death. Many European countries are 5 to 7+ years older on average than the US.
 
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HarryStotle said:
My understanding is that there are approximately 320 000 Chinese nationals living and working in Italy. Many of those work in the textile industry around Prato, near Florence, Padua and Milan. Italy hosts the largest community of Chinese nationals in all of Europe.
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This demographic situation happened because the Italians sold a considerable number of their textile, clothing and leather goods businesses to the Chinese over the last couple of decades. Rather than move the factories to China, the Chinese owners imported cheap labor from China to work in the factories for much lower wages than the Italians were working for. Mainly so they could keep selling “Made in Italy” goods to their country. This was accompanied by the most travel to and from China of any location in Europe. So it should not surprise anyone that Italy is the hotspot of Europe. Italy should have been shutting down traffic from China as Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand did rather quickly. They didn’t and Europe is now paying the price for that while the three named countries have already slowed down further infections.
 
Some new thinking that social distancing is virtually useless and the virus will simply run its course with a rather reduced death rate compared to expected.

…your chance of dying from COVID-19 in the US is 0.22% (almost exactly Korea’s number) and that number assumes that the potency of the virus is the same as when it struck China. If the virus is now less potent it will be even less. Therefore it is unlikely we will exceed hospital capacity, and all the strong measures being taken by our government will not make any difference.All it is doing now is ruining the economy and everyday lives. Do not be alarmed when you see the infection cases go up. They will, and quickly, but the death toll in other countries well into this epidemic does not support what we are being told here.
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I talked to a friend of mine tonight from Italy.
(He lives in America but his family is still all in Italy and he goes back there frequently).

He said they have “Bernie and Biden” socialized medicine in Italy that is coming apart at the proverbial seams.

An absolute nightmare.

His perspective is America is doing a fine job with the situation that has befallen us.
 
Just saw this too . . .
March 13, 2020

For Italy, multilateral globalism, plus socialism, equals death​

By Monica Showalter

Italy’s in dire need of help.

Its health care system is collapsing. The coronavirus has put the whole country in quarantine. There are now 15,000 cases, along with 1,018 deaths, the last 24 hours bringing in 188 more. The casualty count is the highest outside China. And it’s spreading fast. Until a few days ago, the problem was concentrated in the north. Now, it has spread throughout the whole country.

Anyone with a heart can feel pity and an urge to help them. They need help, bad.

But don’t go asking the European Union.

Turns out this open-borders globalist set-up is stiffing the Italians in their hour of need:

First, the EU created the problem by failing to shut down their borders with China, enabling its spread into Italy in the first place. While President Trump was acting swiftly to protect America from the lethal virus, the European Union was saying there was no crisis and calling Trump a xenophobe.

Now, with Italy hit hard based on that hate-Trump ‘logic’, its medical system is overwhelmed. Its doctors and nurses are exhausted. There’s not enough equipment, there’s not enough supplies, and the patients keep coming. The Italians are appealing for help with masks, surgical equipment, doctors, anything that will enable them to get through it and save human lives – and the EU is not giving it.

David Freddoso of the Washington Examiner (hat tip: Instapundit) has a must-read column on how the EU is leaving Italy to fend for itself in its hour of need. . . .

. . . Italy has socialized medicine, the kind Bernie Sanders seeks to push on America, leaving the country way less prepared to handle the pandemic than countries with free market health care systems.

Italy’s central planners didn’t plan for enough beds. There’s not enough staff. There’s no free market to step in and pick up the slack, because it’s not allowed. According to this disturbing piece in the Wall Street Journal, there are signs of a medical system failure, the same kind of thing that in previous socialist hellholes, has triggered man-caused famines: the crops were there, the delivery system was disrupted. Now it’s a health-care famine for Italy, because, same as Venezuela’s oilfields, the cash was spent on today-needs and political crowd pleasers such as “free” stuff, instead of . . .
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‘Not a single EU country’ responded to Italian plea for help with coronavirus​

By Tim Pearce

March 11, 2020 Washington Examiner

A top Italian official knocked the European Union for leaving Italy’s plea for medical assistance unanswered while the coronavirus outbreak cripples the country.

Italy’s permanent representative to the EU, Maurizio Massari, wrote an op-ed in Politico on Tuesday asking for aid from EU members. The Italian official said that while the EU has ignored Italy’s requests for aid, China has begun assisting Italy bilaterally. . . .

. . . “Italy has already asked to activate the European Union Mechanism of Civil Protection for the supply of medical equipment for individual protection,” Massari added. "But, unfortunately, not a single EU country responded to the Commission’s call. . . .
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HarryStotle said:
Some new thinking that social distancing is virtually useless and the virus will simply run its course with a rather reduced death rate compared to expected.
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But that’s the whole purpose of social distancing, reduced deaths over a longer period. Even if the same number are infected in total, more survive since healthcare services were less overloaded.

The below article is on a small village that tested everyone (3k people). They discovered that 50-75% of COVID-19 cases are completely asymptomatic but contagious. Social distancing means these asymptomatic people will do less harm, or at least it will be spread out over a longer time frame.

 
Theo520 said:
But that’s the whole purpose of social distancing,
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Here is a nice simulation in the WaPo the illustrates the point.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/corona-simulator/

As for Tommy:
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
These facebook musing of Tommy are obvious rubbish.

The data that he showed, from which he inferred that the number of cases in the US was subsiding, was marked as incomplete - the falling off in the more recent days was was due to e the incomplete recent reporting. The complete data show that the increase is continuing unabated. Moreover the increase that we are seeing is as rapid as in every western European country. Finally, he misse the critical point of what turned the tide in Hubei. He posits: “the overall ability of the virus to infect goes down with time as it becomes less less potent. Otherwise everyone in Hubei would be dead”. In reality, the lockdown is what turned the tide.
 
What kind of “socialized medicine” is Biden in favour of?!

Nationalised healthcare has been gutted and attacked by neoliberalism in Europe for decades. The left are everywhere on the defensive. A big reason nationalized health services can’t cope is that they have been drastically cut of funding and supplies by states.

Also the USA has yet to reach the conditions of Italy. It will be interesting to see if your friend still says this about the US in two weeks or more.
 
Cathoholic said:
I talked to a friend of mine tonight from Italy.
(He lives in America but his family is still all in Italy and he goes back there frequently).

He said they have “Bernie and Biden” socialized medicine in Italy that is coming apart at the proverbial seams.

An absolute nightmare.

His perspective is America is doing a fine job with the situation that has befallen us.
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They had a significant and sudden overwhelming of their healthcare system.

If the USA has the same, please enlighten us on how the USA will be able to conjure beds and ventilators out of thin air when several people need a bed and all are currently occupied. They cant even get their hands on the testing kits they need and yet somehow they will be better equipped to handle a shortage of greater and more specialised equipment?

America is a few weeks behind Italy on the outbreak curve, alongside several other counties. I wouldn’t be counting any chickens on how well medical systems are coping just yet.
 
_Ruby . . .
They cant even get their hands on the testing kits they need and yet somehow they will be better equipped to handle a shortage of greater and more specialised equipment?
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Sure they can. We have drive-up tests where we are now.

Be careful not to imbibe the anti-American ideas the media attempts to put in our heads.

Some of them clearly want America to fail.

Very self-destructive.
 
Cathoholic said:
_Ruby . . .
They cant even get their hands on the testing kits they need and yet somehow they will be better equipped to handle a shortage of greater and more specialised equipment?
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Failure will depend entirely on how many sick people you have and how many beds and equipment you have for those sick people. Both are based on facts and numbers, whatever narrative you think your media is giving, your system is just as vulnerable to overload.

The roll out of testing in the USA has so far been inadequate, I personally, wouldn’t have great confidence in anything else the USA is doing. But the next few weeks will either prove me right or wrong.
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dvdjs said:
The data that he showed,…
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You may want to address this (unrelated to the above link)…

Seasonal flu US Positive tests (week 40) = 222,552 Number of deaths = 22,000

Death rate seasonal flu by actual cases = 22000 / 222552 = 9.8%

CoronaVirus Positive Tests = 190 836 Number of deaths = 7526

Death Rate coronavirus by actual cases = 7526 / 190 836 = 3.9%

9.8% or 3.9% which is more disconcerting? 🤔
 
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A lot of people in the media seem disappointed that America is doing as well as it is.

My advice?

Don’t imbibe such self-destructive ideology.
 
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