Chinese Medical Team Sent to Help in Hard-Hit Italy
HOLMES: Welcome back. Italy is reporting a grim milestone. On Friday, officials say 250 people died and more than 2,500 new cases of coronavirus were confirmed. That is just in 24 hours. The pandemic is putting a strain, as you might imagine, on health care resources. And as Melissa Bell reports, it is forcing doctors to make tough choices.</s>MELISSA BELL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Italy in crisis as the novel coronavirus aggressively infects the country. The famous tourist-filled streets now mostly empty. Popular landmarks like the Colosseum in Rome without any visitors. Restaurants and bars, shut down as the government slashes flights in and out of the country. More than 15,000 COVID-19 cases, the most outside of China, after a massive jump in just the last day, leaving more than 1,000 people dead from the virus. The country is normally efficient health care system stretched to the limit.</s>DR. ENRICO STORTI, MAGGIORE HOSPITAL: When you receive 100 people at the same time sick as they are and all of the people need your job, otherwise they die, this is exactly what we are seeing because they arrive in the hospital with such a consistent distress that you have to treat these people in seconds.</s>BELL (voice-over): With not enough beds, equipment and physicians.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Me and Dr. Storti, we stayed here for four to five days continuously.</s>BELL (voice-over): Now there are reports that some doctors in Italy are being forced to make painful decisions.</s>YASCHA MOUNK, "THE ATLANTIC": Doctors are being pushed to the point where they might have to make a choice about which patient gets one of those ventilators and which patient is denied bed care.</s>BELL (voice-over): Government officials are denying that. The pandemic hit Italy a few days before the U.S. So far, cases in the United States are mirroring the growth in Italy with no signs that American hospitals are any more prepared than their Italian counterparts. The United States has 2.8 hospital beds per thousand people, fewer than Italy's 3.2 beds per thousand people, according to the OECD. The former Italian prime minister issuing a stark and haunting warning to America: do not wait for it to get worse.</s>MATTEO RENZI, ITALIAN PRIME MINISTER: Please, do not make the same mistakes of undervaluation of the risk.</s>HOLMES: Now Italy is getting some help from a perhaps unexpected place, China, CNN's senior producer Steven Jiang joins us now from Beijing.</s>HOLMES: Tell us about the type of help, China does make a lot of things that the rest of the world needs right now.</s>STEVEN JIANG, CNN SENIOR PRODUCER, BEIJING BUREAU: That is right, we are talking about masks and ventilators but also medical personnel from China to Italy. In recent days, officials here have been highlighting their ramped-up their production capacity of medical supplies, including, for example, 500,000 protective suits being made on a daily basis; 1.6 million N-95 masks as well as a whopping 100 million ordinary face masks. So with the situation domestically improving in the epicenter of Wuhan, for example, they only recorded four new cases on Friday, so presumably, they will have more spare capacity for export of medical supplies to other countries. That is a point the Chinese President Xi Jinping made in a recent letter to his Italian counterpart, saying that China stands ready to share its experience and to offer its assistance. And international solidarity is the only way that the global community can face up to this grave global challenge together.</s>HOLMES: I'll ask you about something else, the U.S. State Department, they believe that China is trying to deflect criticism for its role in the virus, whatever that may be. It is getting a little nasty.</s>JIANG: That is right. The two governments have been pointing a finger at each other in terms of who to blame for this outbreak for a few days now. Things really took a nasty turn, as we mentioned on Thursday, when a prominent Chinese official, he is literally the face of the government, being a foreign ministry spokesman, tweeted to promote this conspiracy theory that it was the U.S. Army that brought this virus to Wuhan back in October when athletes from the U.S. military participated in a sporting event there. It is worth noting that this theory had been circulating in Chinese social media for a while. But even the state media here has debunked it by quoting local hospital officials and saying that they have treated only five sick foreign athletes then, all for malaria. But these facts obviously did not stop Mr. Jao (ph) from tweeting on Thursday to push out this conspiracy theory to his more than 300,000 Twitter followers. And it is also no coincidence we are seeing a very concerted global campaign by Beijing to cast doubt on the origin of the virus. This didn't sit well with Washington. The State Department in the U.S. summoned the Chinese ambassador to the U.S. to protest these comments, saying that the U.S. will not tolerate these comments aimed at deflecting blame for the initial mishandling or alleged cover-up by the Beijing government.</s>HOLMES: Rather unseemly, given the circumstances. Steven Jiang, good to see you in Beijing. Potential pathogens in your pockets. Scientists say your cellphone is loaded with germs. When we come back, we will show you what you can do about it.