Why is Italy being hit so hard? Robert Stacy McCain takes a good look at the reason. From Spectator:
Coronavirus: The Price of Luxury
As the United States prepares for a second week of lockdown to slow the spread of the Chinese coronavirus (COVID-19), hundreds of people in Italy are dying every day from this disease. And the reason why Italy now has more coronavirus deaths than any other country can be summarized in a single word — luxury.
In the world of fashion, the “Made in Italy” tag has a distinct value associated with luxury and status. Merchants can charge higher prices for clothing, shoes, handbags, and other fashion goods manufactured in Italy, and that value was coveted by certain Chinese entrepreneurs. During the past three decades, more and more Chinese investors bought into textile and leather-good factories in northern Italy, and they brought over Chinese laborers to work in those factories. By 2010, there were reportedly 60,000 Chinese in Prato, an industrial suburb of Florence. To accommodate Italy’s new foreign labor force, nonstop flights were established between China and Rome.
None of this was a secret. The Chinese takeover of “Made in Italy” fashion was reported by, among other publications, the Chicago Tribune (“Chinese immigrants transform Italy’s fashion industry,” Jan. 2, 2009), the New York Times (“Chinese Remake the ‘Made in Italy’ Fashion Label,” Sept. 12, 2010), the BBC (“The Italian fashion capital being led by the Chinese,” Feb. 12, 2013), Reuters (“Italy’s Chinese garment workshops boom as workers suffer,” Dec. 29, 2013), the Associated Press (“Clashes amid Italy’s crackdown on its Chinese community,” July 1, 2016) and the New Yorker (“The Chinese Workers Who Assemble Designer Bags in Tuscany,” April 9, 2018). In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, however, our media seem to have gotten a case of collective amnesia; readers and viewers are left mystified as to why Italy has become the epicenter of this pandemic.
After the coronavirus scare sent Italy into a nationwide lockdown earlier this month, several U.S. news organizations (including NPR, Time magazine, and ABC News) decided to address the question, “Why Italy?” Most of their answers had to do with demographics and aging, with Italy having a much larger proportion of senior citizens than other countries. None of them, however, made mention of the tens of thousands of Chinese laborers working in clothing plants in northern Italy, where their COVID-19 outbreak was first detected in February. Considering how the role of Chinese workers in the “Made in Italy” fashion boom had been so widely reported in the past decade, could it be that journalists suddenly forgot this fact? Or should we suspect that these reporters are deliberately overlooking the connection between Italy’s Chinese labor force and this deadly pandemic?
Much more at the site - well researched and a damning condemnation of globalism. Globalism is only attractive to rich people who want to become even more rich. It offers nothing of value to We The People.
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