Italy's drastic measures are not an overreaction. President Donald Trump and Congress must do even more to protect the American public and economy.
I am living in Italy, where my wife, Callista, is the ambassador to the Holy See.
The impact of restricting travel is clear and continuing. The No. 2 airports in Milan and Rome are being closed. The main airports in Italy's two largest cities have radically decreased flights—and many of them are almost empty. When you realize that the current 1,016 deaths in Italy with a population of 60 million would be the equivalent of 5,400 deaths in the United States instead of the 41 deaths we have had so far, you can see what milder, slower and less aggressive responses might have cost in lives. Then we would have needed to move to truly draconian measures of isolation and shutdowns.
As I indicated earlier, if America begins to have the Italian scale of deaths, we would be losing 5,000, 10,000 or 15,000 Americans. If it really got out of control, the rates could go higher. We should be planning for a worst-case pandemic and using the kind of intensity of implementation which served us so well in World War II. Getting enough ventilators, masks, intensive care units, treatment medications and aggressive community-wide testing are the minimum steps to saving lives and stopping the pandemic.
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