Italy's Chinese help beat coronavirus

FLORENCE - In the storm of infection and death sweeping Italy, one big community stands out to health officials as remarkably unscathed — the 50,000 Chinese who live in the town of Prato.

Two months ago, the country's Chinese residents were the butt of insults and violent attack by people who feared they would spread the coronavirus through Italy.

But in the Tuscan town of Prato, home to Italy's biggest single Chinese community, the opposite has been true. Once scapegoats, they are now held up by authorities as a model for early, strict adoption of infection-control measures.

"We Italians feared that the Chinese of Prato were to be the problem. Instead, they did much better than us," said Renzo Berti, top state health official for the area, which includes Florence.

"Among Chinese resident in Prato there isn't even one case of COVID contagion," he said, referring to COVID-19, which has killed almost 12,000 people in Italy, more than in any other country.

Chinese make up about a quarter of Prato's population, but Berti credits them with bringing down the entire town's infection rate to almost half the Italian average — 62 cases per 100,000 inhabitants versus 115 for the country.

Prato's Chinese community, built originally around the textile industry, went into lockdown from the end of January, three weeks before Italy's first recorded infection.

Many were returning from new year holidays in China.

They knew what was coming and spread the word: stay home.

So as Italians headed to the ski slopes and crowded into cafes and bars as normal, the Chinese inhabitants of Prato had seemingly disappeared. Its streets, still festooned with Chinese New Year decorations, were semi-deserted, shops shuttered.

There is some anecdotal evidence that Chinese people elsewhere in Italy took similar precautions, though national data on infection rates among the community is unavailable. The health ministry did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Milan restaurateur Francesco Wu, a representative of Italian business lobby Confcommercio, said he urged Italian counterparts in February to shut down their businesses, as he had done.

"Most of them looked at me like a Cassandra," he said. "No one could believe it was happening here ... Now Troy is burning and we are all locked inside."