Coronavirus: why Prato, home to Italy’s biggest single Chinese community, is remarkably unscathed

Prato’s Chinese community went into lockdown from the end of January, three weeks before Italy’s first recorded infection

Town’s infection rate to almost half the Italian average – 62 cases per 100,000 inhabitants versus 115 for the country

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Businessman Luca Zhou, 56, on the streets of Prato, home to the biggest ethnic Chinese community, in Italy. Photo: Reuters

Published: 11:24am, 1 Apr 2020Updated: 8:33pm, 1 Apr 2020

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

Two months ago, the country’s Chinese residents were the target of what Amnesty International described as shameful discrimination, 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.

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