It's worth noting that South Korea also was able to engage in such mass mobilization. Moreover, if the trends continue for a few weeks, China's not going to have an order of magnitude more death anymore.
Italy's high CFR sounds like a health care that's broken far more than the Chinese health care system, a system which essentially isn't taking any specific extreme measures (which would be building more hospitals, importing more health care workers, etc).
Korea CDC has raw numbers it looks like. https://www.cdc.go.kr/board/board.es?mid=a30402000000&bid=00...
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/f2jiyz/uclo_jun...
However once things get even more overwhelmed, you have bad cases become critical leading to more fatalities.
The going figure seems to 20% are badly impacted, with 5% of that critical. Some of that 15% will become critical without treatment that might not be available. Thus impacting people <70.
I think you're combining two largely-unrelated factors. The news in any country is only going to be interested in the most salacious stories in countries 12 time zones away. This is just how the market operates. A tiny percentage of china dying from a new kind of flu is not as headline-grabbing as people dying due to govt misbehavior.
Meanwhile our govt isn't blind, they have people and plans in place for everything and they think they are ready and in control. Then, it turns out it's a clusterfuck anyway that takes way longer than expected to implement. They need to have dealt with the exact same disaster in recent years to get it right. It's a problem with implementing a large-scale system you can't test until it's needed.
But in fact I doubt there really is a plan in place at all. It seems most countries ignored this, hoping they'll be spared of this, then stumbled along with adhoc measures, and only now slowly start to listen to experts.
Saying there is nothing we could have done better from just looking at what unfolds in China is very questionable.
> The news in any country is only going to be interested in the most salacious stories in countries 12 time zones away. This is just how the market operates.
... for about a month, and still bringing it up to this date.
Compare [1] to [2]. Notice anything? Western, especially US media is becoming more and more of an echo chamber trying to strengthen that simplistic world view that we are the good guys and they are the bad guys. But it's not overly surprising really, considering the financial struggles of traditional media over the last decade. As you said, the focus shifts more and more towards stories and headlines that sell, even for once renowned outlets like the NYTimes.
Do you recall the international coverage of Hurricane Katrina? It was dominated by the stories about rape gangs and anarchy which all ultimately turned out to be false rumors. Media everywhere sucks like that to some degree. As an american, I probably notice the bias towards stories that make the US look bad a lot more than you might.
Though I get what you're saying. US media may be one of the worst in the developed world. I don't even look at it anymore. Lucky I learned about coronavirus from here and adjusted my plans for it. And the NYT in particular seems to be really anti-China since they got blocked in China a long time ago.
The issue has to do with preparedness and healthcare capacity. South Korea has 3x the number of hospital beds per capita than Italy.
It’s Simpson’s paradox
The initial cover up didn't help either. Once they instated the lockdown, they could test the backlog of people. That took quitea while. But now the spread has pretty much stopped, while everywhere else on this planet it increases day by day.
After the initial cover-up got public, the West couldn't get enough of reporting about it, and how this is the reason it could spread so fast, how irresponsible it was, and how it's typical for evil China. Now we have that virus here, plus two month of knowledge about it, and we're still mostly being reactive instead of proactive. In China's defense, when they tried to cover it up, much less was known about the disease, like it's asymptomatic spread. Now the cards are on the table and we're being ignorant, as if ignoring a problem makes it go away. But hey, when things are getting really really ugly for us, we can still go back to blaming China for their initial cover-up.
Watch Italy closely the next days, and compare it to China when they were at a similar stage. It will tell you what's to come in your country too. Another thing that's suspicious about Italy is the high CFR of around 6%. It most likely means they're not doing enough testing, only the severe cases, so the rest wanders around the country happily spreading it further.