Coronavirus: Why has the disease spread so quickly in Italy?
As northern Italy struggles with Europe’s first and largest outbreak of Covid-19, Robert Fisk examines the region’s links to China
So what is it about Italy? It’s not difficult to trace the coronavirus path along the Muslim pilgrim routes of Iran. But it seems much more difficult to account for the extraordinary spread of the virus in Lombardy and 14 other provinces. Why have the Italian authorities placed 16 million of their people in quarantine while at the same time failing to explain to us why the richest part of their country has engendered so many cases of coronavirus around the world? Across Europe, recent visitors to Italy have returned home as carriers, infected and potentially infecting their family and friends as well as complete strangers in their own countries. Is there something about Italy we don’t know?
First, an important digression. At the time of writing, in Italy, 7,375 people have tested positive and 366 have died. But that’s only 20 more than the dead of the two Boeing 737 Max aircraft that fell to earth in Indonesia and Ethiopea, terrifying and tragic though these disasters were. And as we all know, up to 626,000 folk die every year around the world from common or garden flu. As Alex Thomson of Channel 4 keeps repeating: perspective, perspective, perspective. After all, when an expert talked on the same channel last week of coronavirus and the Second World War in the same sentence, I asked myself some simple questions. Yes, there are now more than 100,000 cases around the globe, almost four thousand of whom have died. But wasn’t the total death toll in the Second World War close to 70 million? Didn’t the Soviet Union lose 20 million souls in the war against Hitler?
But now back to Italy. Why is it a centre for coronavirus in Europe? My travels these past few weeks have included Lebanon, Turkey and Ireland, so Italy has not been on my journalistic radar. Indeed, I might have left this question about the people of northern Italy in the air had I not picked up on a comment made by the Italian ambassador to Dublin, Paolo Serpi, to RTE, Ireland’s national radio service.
He was telling listeners to the daily Irish current affairs programme Drivetime that they should not overdramatise or become hysterical about coronavirus. EU members – the Republic of Ireland is in the European Union, of course, and has only 21 cases and no deaths – are responsible for each other. “It is a serious situation but we don’t want to transform it into a drama when it is not a drama,” said Italy’s man in Ireland. And so say all of us.
But then Signor Serpi spoke about northern Italy, and suddenly added: “It has Italy’s largest Chinese population because of the textile industry. That is why Italy was the first country to be affected in Europe on such a scale.”
I have always suspected that journalists and police officers have a lot in common. Both dwell on the costs of human folly. So when I read these words of Signor Serpi, I naturally wondered what it was that we were not being told about the Italian outbreak of coronavirus. Or whether what we are being told is correct. For Italian colleagues are reporting that even amid the largest Chinese community in northern Italy – in Prato near Florence – there has not been a single case of coronavirus. There are around 300,000 Chinese people in Italy and 20,000 among Prato’s population of 190,000. That’s around one in 10.
The Chinese now run most of Prato’s textile industry and long before the current pandemic, writers and journalists examined what this meant for local Italians. Simple. The traditional clothing industry in the city had been taken over by Chinese immigrants, importing cheap textiles from Wenzhou in Zhejiang province – home city for most of the Chinese people in Prato – and producing fast-fashion shirts, trousers and jackets and later clothes for luxury fashion houses such as Gucci and Prada. The labels bore the precious – and accurate – moniker: Made in Italy.
When New Yorker staff writer DT Max visited Prato in the spring of 2018 – almost two years before Italy’s coronavirus outbreak – he found 6,000 businesses registered to Chinese citizens and an infection of xenophobia among Italian residents. He quoted a right-wing senator, Patrizio La Pietra, who told a local newspaper that the city should confront “Chinese economic illegality” and that their underground economy had “brought Italy to its knees, eliminated thousands of jobs, and exposed countless families to hunger”.
Native residents accused Chinese immigrants of bringing crime, gang warfare and garbage to Prato. An Italian leather artisan, who told Max that her husband was forced out of bag-making by local Chinese competition, said of the immigrants: “They copy, they imitate. They don’t do anything original.”
Max noted that the traditionally left-wing city was now voting for right-wing politicians. There was indeed evidence of a Chinese mafia in Prato which, intriguingly, operated without any connection to the homegrown Italian variety. Sweat shops there were aplenty – but also well-run and modern Chinese clothing factories. Some Chinese businesspeople are now among Prato’s richest men and women, sending their children to an elite university in Milan. There are friendly relations between Chinese and Italian people.
But let’s go back to the origins of Prato’s Chinese population. By far the largest majority come from Wenzhou in the Chinese coastal province of Zhejiang – 500 miles from Wuhan, the epicentre of the original virus outbreak. Yet today, Chinese authorities have quarantined 30 million people around Wenzhou – some literally locked into their homes, according to a recent Washington Post report – to which the respiratory illness has now spread.
Wenzhou has the most coronavirus infections outside Hubei province whose capital is Wuhan – where more than 100,000 Wenzhou people also live. As the outbreak took hold, the Post has reported, 20,000 people were placed under quarantine in Wenzhou hotels. Some visitors to Wenzhou found themselves harshly treated when they returned to their homes elsewhere in Zhejiang province. Xenophobia it seems, like coronavirus, knows no barriers.
Which brings us back to the Wenzhou Chinese of Prato. Until recently, there were regular direct flights between Wenzhou and Rome – and you’d think this might be a sure way of transmission of the virus from China to a city scarcely 20 miles from Florence. Yet it seems not. Thousands of Chinese in Prato, so local papers have reported, have voluntarily isolated themselves in their homes for two weeks without any proof that they might be carriers of the virus – regarding their actions as a civic duty towards their fellow Italian and Chinese neighbours. The miserable conditions in which many of these Chinese work in Prato have led, it appears, to no outbreak of coronavirus. The same applies in Rome’s Chinatown on the Esquiline hill where no coronavirus has been reported.
So what are we to make of Signor Serpi’s remarks? Does the Chinese community in Italy really explain why Italy was the first country in Europe to be affected by coronavirus on such a scale? Or should the Chinese be staying away from Italians in case they catch the infection from those whose families have lived in Italy for hundreds of years?
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