Italy’s older population and overwhelmed healthcare system are two of the biggest causes behind its skyrocketing CCP virus death rate, according to Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Party’s coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.
Speaking to Fox News on March 20, Fauci said the country’s elderly population, many of whom have underlying health conditions, is a major contributing factor to it’s alarming 8.3 percent mortality rate.
“I think the most logical issue for Italy is that one, they have an older population, and as a matter of fact, these serious consequences such as hospitalization, intensive care, and even death are very heavily weighted towards both the elderly and those who have underlying conditions—heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, etc,” Fauci said.
Speaking about South Korea, which was one of the earliest countries to report a significant CCP virus outbreak, but which has since seen a dramatic decline in new cases, Fauci said Italy’s demographic population is different to that of the East Asian nation.
“So they probably have a demographic population that’s a bit different than South Korea. But the other thing is that they may have been so overwhelmed, that they had is they ran out of the kind of intensive care capabilities that you would like to give the maximum care to an individual,” he said.
“So, when you overwhelm the system, you’re not able to give maximum care. So they may have been really double-whammied. One, they have a population that’s an older population but they have also been terribly hit, very strongly.”
Elsewhere, Fauci said it is still unclear when the virus will reach its peak and begin to subside in the United States but that he expects Americans will have to stay home and practice social distancing for at least several weeks.
“If you look at the curve of the outbreaks in places where we now have experiences—look at China, look at what happened in South Korea, look at what is happening in Italy—you see the outbreak putters along and then it goes way up, peaks, and then comes down. The height of the peak and the duration is obviously influenced by the things you do to mitigate it, the kind of things we are doing right now; physical separation of people.
“But if you take a look at a typical duration of an outbreak, it’s measured in a few weeks. The China one was about six or eight weeks before it was really way down… there’s no question when you look at the various models, it is going to be a few weeks.”
China’s national health commission claimed on March 19 that there were no new infections in the entire country. Data from China has been opaque at best, while netizens say they don’t trust the Chinese regime’s narrative.
A comparison with Italy suggests the death toll is significantly underreported. Italy adopted the solutions that the Chinese regime used in China and experienced a pandemic. The CCP virus death toll in Italy, which currently sits at 4,825, translates to a death rate of 9 percent. In China, with a much larger population exposed to the virus, the reported death toll of 3,265 results in a death rate of 4 percent, less than half that reported in Italy.
The activity in the CCP virus epicenter in Hubei Province seems to contradict the reported death toll in China. The seven funeral houses in Wuhan, China were reported to be burning bodies 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in late January. China also has used 40 mobile cremators, each capable of burning 5 tons a day, in Hubei Province since Feb. 16. In addition, outside some villages bodies have been observed being burned in open air pits.
Italy’s death toll leaped by 793 to 4,825 on Saturday—an increase of 19.6 percent and the largest daily rise in absolute terms since the contagion emerged a month ago. Of those originally infected nationwide, 6,072 had fully recovered on Saturday compared to 5,129 the day before, while 2,857 people were in intensive care compared to the previous figure of 2,655.
Nicole Hao contributed to this report.
