I had read reports that there were a large number of Chinese in Italy; included in the report was the suggestion that the Chinese workers were in Italy as low-paid employees/workers for the Italian ‘luxury’ brand market so items could be sold as Produced in Italy - using cheap labour. Seems this Guardian report backs up what I’d already read.
And Austria is heavily implicated in the spread because the wealthy elites spent time on their ski-ing holidays, and despite cases being reported the authorities ‘hushed’ it all up for as long as they could.
So there we have an interesting aspect - the poor Chinese workers in Italy, and the rich on their ski-ing holidays - helped spread this Chinese virus. Funny old world isn’t it ?
We’ve been censored; the whole series of posts about the origin of this chinese virus have disappeared. Anyone think it had something to do with questioning china’s record on human rights ?
What’s going on - don’t we have free speech any more.
Watch it everyone - seems we can’t speak the truth any more.
Italy is a relatively small country with high population in the north.
UK is a relatively small country with high population in the south.
The only other difference is that Italy is a few weeks ahead.
I expect to see a very similar situation developing in the UK.
It’s an interesting paper but, if I’m reading it right, they are claiming over 10% of the blood samples - in an effectively random population sample - were positive for SARS Cov-2 antibodies before the pandemic struck.
That’s an incredibly high level if we consider that, as of today, less than 10% of Italy’s population has tested positive for Covid during the whole of the pandemic (just over 4 million cases from a mpopulation of 60 million - 6.7% approx).
Initially yes it was true that only symptomatic patients were tested which led to a significent under-estimation of true case numbers.
However as testing became much more widespread many more asymptomatic cases were tested - probably for the last 9 months positive tests represented 80% or more of the actual case numbers.
10% of a random sample positive for antibodies in September 2019 is massive and it warrants some analysis (which was not offered) as to why these infections were not more obvious - with up to 20% of Covid cases being serious enough to need hospitalisation there should have been significant numbers of very ill people coming through.
It is very odd. I can only imagine the lack of serious cases if the virus at that time was less pathogenic but this would have been picked up. I’m sure we will hear more.
