I'm italian and this is "nothing" compared to what's going here.

We have the military transporting dozens of corpses out of the "hot zones" because cemeteries can't handle them all, and a guy even posted a video on YouTube with his dead sister behind him in her bedroom because the hospital couldn't test her, she died hours later because she was positive and non-tested and public services refused to take her away before the 36hrs-something that would make the transportation safe for them.

I also red A LOT of jokes about this whole situation on all the US channels I regularly follow, and it was clear that a lot of US citizen took this whole thing too lightly and like something that would never touch them and was "just like a flu" at best.

I'm really sad for this nurse and I understand her empathy for the people she's curing and the whole situation but, with the premise that this is not a race for who's life's the worst, why on earth does the US "get it" just now?

The risks were clear since january and countries like mine are in total lockdown since a month or so, but they've been running specific tests and putting people in quarantine since february.

Again, don't want this post to sound like the situation there isn't bad(thing is I'm not a native speaker so my wording isn't always the best, sorry for that) but even if I totally understand emotional breakdown, the things she's describing to me seem no news and even before they came to us we knew the situation would be this in case of an outbreak.

Also, keep in mind that even if in Italy the healthcare system is "free" we're in this awful situation I just described(because the dumb governments kept cutting money to it over the years) but in case of a huge outbreak I fear for the US where I know that most people have an health insurance, but a lot don't.