When comparing countries (e.g. Italy against South Korea), you have to consider many factors.
Cultural factors: how quickly do people change their habits, to do e.g. social distancing. Do people in public wear surgical masks. Population density, temperature, weather,...
Lying governments: I don't think South Korea or Italy are lying, but Iran is for sure, and China up to some point (at least early on). Italy stopped testing at some point, but this is known. South Korea increased testing over time.
Herd immunity: maybe a part of the population was already immune before (too early to say), but it couldn't have "kicked in" during this year as there was only one wave yet.
There is no question whatsoever that this corona virus IFR is a lot higher than the 2009 H1N1 flu, but lower than the 1918 H1N1 flu. When comparing countries / regions, you should consider the population age pyramid (Italy has more old people than South Korea) and how overwhelmed the hospitals are (I think quite bad in Italy and Wuhan).
A co-worker from Italy told me. But you can find this for example here as well: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/03/italy-south-korea-dif... "Italy started out testing widely, then narrowed the focus so that now, authorities do not have to process hundreds of thousands of tests." (I don't normally read Aljazeera... just found this using Google.) It matches what my co-worker told me. See also https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/covid-19-testing/ (I have no clue how reliable that source is)
I live in Italy and I'm not aware of any changes in the procedure for testing.
If I read the worldometer link you provided what I see is that both on March 2nd and on March 9th Italy was second only to Korea in number of tests performed and that we moved from 386 tests per million people to 1005 in the same period. What am I reading wrong?
Cultural factors: how quickly do people change their habits, to do e.g. social distancing. Do people in public wear surgical masks. Population density, temperature, weather,...
Lying governments: I don't think South Korea or Italy are lying, but Iran is for sure, and China up to some point (at least early on). Italy stopped testing at some point, but this is known. South Korea increased testing over time.
Herd immunity: maybe a part of the population was already immune before (too early to say), but it couldn't have "kicked in" during this year as there was only one wave yet.
There is no question whatsoever that this corona virus IFR is a lot higher than the 2009 H1N1 flu, but lower than the 1918 H1N1 flu. When comparing countries / regions, you should consider the population age pyramid (Italy has more old people than South Korea) and how overwhelmed the hospitals are (I think quite bad in Italy and Wuhan).