If a lot of people die, a lot of economic value will be literally put into the ground: funerals, handling of estates, coffins. That's not long-term productive value. At best it reshuffles money in an optimal-blind way.

And they have roughly 5 times the beds per 1000 people too.

No they don't. Italy has much fewer critical care beds (the kind needed for COVID) than the United States, which is #1 in the world.

> No they don't. Italy has much fewer critical care beds (the kind needed for COVID) than the United States, which is #1 in the world.

Do you have a link to statistics that support that? Is that on an absolute basis or on a per-capita basis?

On a per-capita basis, I see more hospital beds in Italy than in the US (3.18 to 2.77): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_hosp...

What's your source for data on critical care beds? I'd love to take a look

Oh sorry. Meant to post the article, from Forbes. US and germany are way ahead of the world.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/03/12/the-co...

Hospital beds are a different story, but not what is important for COVID, which needs ICU beds. Hospital beds are much easier to deploy anywhere (and with the emergency measures taken federally, will see a huge increase due to waived FDA requirements for inspection). An ICU is much more involved, and requires ventilators, specialty beds, special equipment, etc. Much more difficult to deploy suddenly in response to sudden upticks.