You've heard many explanations for the cascade of Covid lockdowns in 2020. You've never heard this one. (And it's fascinating.)

Did an earthquake in Italy in April 2009 help fuel the catastrophic overreaction to the coronavirus 12 years later?

China started the Covid lockdowns.

But Italy spread them worldwide.

On February 22, 2020, as the coronavirus receded in China, Italian authorities closed several towns, making Italy the first Western country to quarantine its citizens.

Nine days later, Italy closed its schools. Then, on March 9, it announced a national lockdown, testing “what a democracy can do during peacetime,” the Washington Post wrote.

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Italy began moving before the British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson had created his terrifying projections that Covid would collapse health care systems. (Ferguson loves a good disaster, or at least a good disaster prediction - in 2005, he promised 200 million bird flu deaths.)

Ferguson himself credited Italy with helping him show Britain and the United States that societal “suppression” was possible. In December 2020, he told the Times of London that China’s forced quarantines didn’t seem relevant to Western countries because China is "a communist one-party state… and then Italy did it. And we realized we could.”

Then Italy did it. But why did Italy do it?

Amazingly, at the time of its first local lockdowns, the country had suffered only three Covid deaths - including that of a 77-year-old man hospitalized for other illnesses. What drove Italy to pull the trigger so fast?

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