 Outside of China, Italy has been hit the hardest with COVID-19 and I think it is absolutely crucial that us in America pay attention to what's going on in Italy and we take notes. What are they doing right? What are they doing wrong? Because we may be less capable of dealing with this crisis than Italy is because they have things that we don't have. They have a single-payer healthcare system. People's feeling symptoms can go to a doctor, but that's not necessarily the case here in the United States. If you feel ill and you don't have health insurance, your primary care physician is the ER. That's the only place where you can go and just being at the emergency room that will likely increase the chance that any types of illnesses and airborne illnesses and diseases COVID will spread. So we may be less capable of dealing with this than Italy. And if we don't pay attention and take action, then we may be looking at a really worse problem than anywhere else in the world. So the latest update on Italy gives us just a taste of what we can expect if we're not smart here. So as Justine Coleman of The Hill reports, Italy on Sunday reported its biggest one-day increase in cases and deaths during the coronavirus outbreak. Italy recorded 3,590 cases and 398 deaths in a 24-hour period. Italy's Civil Protection Chief Angelo Borelli announced Sunday, the Associated Press reported. In total, the country has confirmed more than 24,700 cases and more than 1,800 deaths. The country, which has been on lockdown since last week, reports that almost 2,000 people have recovered from the coronavirus in the nation. Italy's previous record number of deaths in a 24-hour period was 250, which was announced Friday. Italy's National Health Institute Chief Silvio Brussoferro said it is unclear if Italy is reaching its peak number of cases, meaning it could soon decline according to the AP. The World Health Organization has said most people will recover from the virus and almost 74,000 have, mostly in China, where the virus is believed to have originated. The coronavirus has infected more than 156,000 people and killed more than 5,800 leading several countries such as the United States to encourage so-called social distancing to avoid the spread of the virus. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CBS on Sunday morning that Italy left the virus to its own devices, leading the number of cases to go way up. So we need to learn from Italy. Italy left the disease to its own devices, and this made the situation exponentially worse. Now in the United States, we can already see that we're not doing enough and we're not getting out enough tests to people. We don't necessarily, like we're kind of operating in the dark, and that's a really dangerous thing. We should be currently arming ourselves with the supplies that we need, the information that we need, and we're just not doing that. To kind of just look at how bad it could get, this is what an Italian doctor said in an interview with Sky News. It was just, it was horrifying, and when I watched this, I felt like this sick feeling in my stomach because to imagine that situation is just, it's horrible, and the fact that this could spread to other countries that aren't prepared. It's truly a nightmare scenario. Right now I'm in an operating theater that we closed last week and transformed it into a COVID ICU, and this is the second block out of three in my hospital. So now we have a general ICU that is clean with no COVID patient, but now we are, we canceled all the elective and non-urgent surgery, and we are using two other theaters for COVID patients. So we are expecting a surge in the next days, and we all hope that this surge will not reach the intensity of Lombardy. We are probably nine to 10 days behind Lombardy, and the intensity that this epidemic reached in the area around Milan was really, really hit very hard the healthcare system. So many hospitals are nearly collapsing, and the force cast for the next 10 to 15 days is even worse. So this situation changed completely our lives in a little more than one week. We are working very hard with extraordinary efforts in order to increase our ICU capacity and hospital capacity, with also high dependency units working a lot in order to increase availability for patients. But we are not sure that we'll be enough. So my suggestion is that you get prepared as soon as you can because once you start admitting severe ICU patients, it's probably too late for social distancing, isolation and lockdowns. Now, I will link you to the full interview down below because he goes on to talk more about how the doctors are overworked and they're barely getting sleep. It's just, this is a global tragedy. You know, it's a global pandemic, but it's also a tragedy. And what he said there was absolutely horrifying. They're creating makeshift COVID ICUs. They're canceling elective procedures. Hospitals are nearly collapsing. That's his words, not mine. This is terrible. And I want you to see what's happening in Italy and not to scare you, understand that the United States is poised to have even a worse situation, a worse fallout from this, if you will, than Italy because we're just not as prepared as Italy is. And I want to read this article from Vice News, Tim Hume. He explains, I think very obviously to those of us on the left, why the U.S. is uniquely positioned to be worse off than Italy if COVID does in fact spread to the extent that it has in Italy. Italy is implementing radical new measures against COVID-19 and that could soon be the new normal for other countries fighting the virus. But experts say a number of unique factors in the United States, a sluggish approach to testing and a lack of public health care and paid sick days for home workers are likely to make its battle to contain the outbreak even more difficult than Europe. The situation is worse for the United States. Francis Bellow, a professor of computational systems biology at University College London told Vice News, quote, the U.S. is a special case. Despite the U.S. government's pledges to ramp up testing capacity, it appeared that far fewer tests were being carried out in the United States than in other affected countries in Europe. There's very little testing. It's lagged quite badly behind, he said. There's a lot of unknowns. Exact figures are difficult to establish since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week that it would no longer provide an official tally of tests conducted under the investigation because states and private institutions had been authorized to conduct their own tests. But an analysis by The Atlantic published Friday could only confirm 1,895 tests carried out in the United States where the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases passed 550 on Monday. By contrast in the U.K., where 319 cases have been confirmed, health authorities have conducted more than 20,000 tests, William Schaffner, professor of preventative medicine and infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, told Al Jazeera that problems with the U.S. testing system meant the country lagged behind much of the rest of the world when it came to testing. We don't know yet in the United States whether the coronavirus is widely distributed or whether it is just present in certain small spots, he said. Below said the lack of a public health care system and of guaranteed paid sick leave for all workers would also hamper efforts to respond to the outbreak in the United States. It will make it much more difficult to convince people to self-isolate and impose the required social distancing methods said below. So in a multitude of ways, we are uniquely positioned to be worse off than Italy. And it's scary. So basically, when it comes to testing, we're kind of in the dark. We don't necessarily know the full scope of COVID-19 in the United States because we're not conducting as many tests as other countries are. So the problem could be more widespread than we know, but we don't have access to tests. Like ask yourself this, if you feel as if you want a test, do you know how you would get a test, has your private health insurance provider reached out to you, a lot of us have no idea what to do. So there's that on top of it. The fact that we don't have a guaranteed paid sick leave means that people are forced to go into work. Now hopefully that will change. Hopefully these private companies will realize that they are stupid to force their workers to work if they are in an industry that is non-essential, right? But at the end of the day, capital is the most important thing. So they're not going to jeopardize their profits. So that's another issue, right? Workers just, they can't stay home because they're afraid that they'd lose their jobs and even if they weren't afraid that they'd be fired, they'd lose money. So we're in this situation where having basically no social safety net makes us uniquely vulnerable in comparison with other developed countries and that's something that has to change. We can't, we can't do this. We can't continue to pretend as if not having Medicare for all is acceptable. We can't continue to pretend that not having paid sick leave and looking out for workers more generally speaking isn't going to hurt us. I mean, with climate change upon us, you know, this could be the first of many global pandemics that we're dealing with. So we have to arm ourselves with the capability to stay home if the government says we should be practicing social distancing. But the fact that that's not something that people can do because of the economic system that we have built, it makes it, you know, really bad where, you know, we see how bad it is in Italy and can only speculate how bad it's going to get here in the United States. And just the thought that we don't have, you know, makeshift facilities built to accommodate hospitals that will undoubtedly be overburdened if this gets worse. The fact that we're looking at a shortage of ventilators and not acting immediately, what do we do? Like where we get to a situation where you're literally choosing who lives and dies. That's, that's horrifying. We should be prepared for this. We should be able to deal with this. But the fact that we're not and the fact that it's so bad in Italy and it could be worse here, that's really scary. And it's something that we have to deal with. And as much as we can, we have to try to stay home, self-quarantine. But, you know, I just want people to understand like, I'm not doing this video to scare people. I want you to realize that, you know, we have to do everything in our power to make sure that it doesn't get to the point that it is in Italy. And a lot of us, that's not in our control, right? This is something that the government and government, state governments, local governments have to do. They have to take action. But if it gets to a point where it's like Italy, it's going to be worse for us than it is in Italy because of the way our system is built. So just pace yourselves. We don't know how long this is going to last, but whatever, whatever you can do to protect yourself, do it.