why is italy getting hit with mortality rates more similar to china and the united states than mortality rates comparable to other oecd countries?
that's a complicated question that i'm not ready to take a guess at, and that is no doubt not particularly pressing to the people on the ground. but, i can point a few things out about italy.
italy actually has an unusually high poverty rate for a western europe country; it's poverty rate is actually comparable to that in the united states, which is unusual for western europe. it's a country with a lot of open markets and public functions, which is different from much of northern europe - but so is spain.
this article suggests that italy just has an unusually high number of very old people, so, oddly, it's high mortality rate is a consequence of it's longer average lifespan:
these are things that will need to be worked out over time.
for right now, it is an outlier on the continent, and i suspect that this isn't all that surprising to most europeans.
if you remove italy from the dataset, the mortality rate in europe remains under 1%.