No, the far more likely explanation is that the total number of cases reported for Italy don't reflect reality.
Because they are overwhelmed Italian hospitals basically send people home if they have a fever or other symptoms with no test administered, instructed to come back in case the symptoms worsen, only people having trouble breathing being admitted in the ICU.
Italy could easily have in reality 10 times the number of reported total cases or more.
> Because they are overwhelmed Italian hospitals basically send people home if they have a fever or other symptoms with no test administered,
Sources, please.
> only people having trouble breathing being admitted in the ICU.
Well, why would you put someone without respiratory failure in an ICU to egin with?
Also, Italy performs 1 test per 1000 people [1]. Surely there are more cases than the reported ones, but 10 times? I am no statistician, but wouldn't it require extreme bad luck to miss so many cases with such extensive testing?
As posted else thread, the percentage of positive tests in Italy is almost 5 times larger than in Korea. This probably means that the infected population is much higher than what's being reported.
In the initial weeks of the crisis, the Italian government said that they would switch to only reporting symptomatic cases [1] ("because that what every body else is doing") instead of all positive tests. I do not know if they followed through, but that would make a large difference if Korea was reporting everything.
edit: as far as I understand, that only changes what they report in the official numbers that make the news. The actual medical data might contain the real numbers.
edit2: if they started doing what they said they would, the actual positive rate would be even higher. So the issue is likely that they are just not testing as much.
> This probably means that the infected population is much higher than what's being reported.
Agree, is the logical thing. The bigger the sample, the better the results.
Another possible option could be that caucasian people is more susceptible for some reasons than asian people. The reasons could be genetic or cultural (i.e previous exposition to similar viruses by gastronomy). Without more data, I would take the first option as closer to truth.
Did they test random people or only people with symptoms? If the latter then your distribution is heavily biased and a 10x difference is not an outlier, it's the expected outcome.
According to those stats 14% of people tested were positive and of those, about half had to be admitted to hospital. It's clearly very far from a random sample.
Also keep in mind that the false negatives for the tests is pretty high, because the tests require a significant viral load in the blood and in some cases it can take several days after the symptoms set in.
Just look at how many people from other other countries got infected in northern Italy a few weeks ago. Italy had diagnosed a few hundred cases, yet suddenly hundreds and hundreds of people who were in the area and have returned home now have it in other countries. It's clearly far more highly prevalent than testing suggests.
Because they are overwhelmed Italian hospitals basically send people home if they have a fever or other symptoms with no test administered, instructed to come back in case the symptoms worsen, only people having trouble breathing being admitted in the ICU.
Italy could easily have in reality 10 times the number of reported total cases or more.