“With all due respect for Medicare for All, you have a single-payer system in Italy — it doesn’t work there.” Such was Joe Biden’s reply to Bernie Sanders when the Vermont senator suggested that a universal public health care system is the protection America needs against the coronavirus epidemic. But for Italians closed up in their homes — in a country gripping on to its Servizio Sanitario Nazionale (SSN, National Health Care Service) as a last bastion of protection in these difficult times — Biden’s claims were simply unreal.

Yes, the advent of coronavirus is a tough test for Italian society — and one imposing hard sacrifices on all of us. For the last week, we’ve been living in near-total isolation, able to go out only for food shopping, for other urgent reasons, or — for those forced to do so — to go to work. Even the Italian cities normally considered most chaotic are now surreally deserted and silent; the economy is giving off troubling signs. There’s a tug-of-war between trade unions, businesses, and the government over the possibility of shutting down production to keep workers safe and the social policies needed to soften the crisis’s effects.

Yet even in such a trying situation, no one would dream of raising question marks over the SSN. Not even the most right-wing forces — not even the Italian equivalents of Donald Trump — are currently prepared to say anything about public health care other than to offer praise and support. Universal public health care is doubtless the reason why Italy hasn’t collapsed, explaining why the difficulties we face haven’t yet turned into mass tragedy.