There’s a reason Italy got hit so hard and particularly the north, but you won’t hear it in the mainstream media.
From around 2010 Chinese companies started buying Italian fashion houses, not least because the Chinese middle classes so loved the Italian look. They needed to keep the coveted Made in Italy label for their output so, instead of moving factories to China, they moved Chinese workers to Lombardy and Tuscany (centred on Milan and Florence). Google it - New Yorker magazine said there was as many as 20000 in Prato, a tiny town in Tuscany. That was in 2013. There’s as many as 200000 in total in Italy today - possibly a lot more. And the Chinese fashion industry is based guess where? Yep, Wuhan - home of both the companies doing the buying and the cheap workers being shipped to work in sweatshops in Italy. Many would have returned home for Chinese New Year January 25th, just as the virus was ramping up in their home city, and returned with the virus soon after. As stated, you won’t hear this in the mainstream media - and I wonder how long this post will last. So we may not be in for an Italian scale crisis after all - that was due to very particular reasons.