Notice that most EU countries, at least so far, are handling the crisis quite well. Germany, Austria, and the Scandinavian countries have low case-fatality rates. Spain, France, and the (former EU member!) United Kingdom are doing worse. The U.S. is right in the middle. While this graph certainly raises a lot of questions, the biggest question is not, “Is the U.S. the next Italy?” but, “What is wrong with Italy?”

And we may have an answer to that question. An analysis by Andreas Backhaus shows that young people in Korea were much more likely to get infected (and hence survive) than in Italy, where a disproportionately large number of older people got infected (and hence died). We saw a microcosm of this in the Seattle area, where multiple people died in a single nursing home.

This isn’t the only reason that the U.S isn’t the next Italy. The U.S., by far, has more critical care (ICU) beds per capita than any other country in the world.