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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Italy’s sudden stampede is particularly striking given the country’s apparent nonchalance about flu deaths.

With one of the world’s oldest populations, Italy regularly sees excess mortality during severe influenza seasons. In both the 2015 and 2017 winters, it had more than 40,000 excess deaths from flu or flu-like illnesses - the equivalent of more than 200,000 in the United States. Those deaths hardly registered in Italy, or anywhere else.

But the coronavirus, as the media endlessly explained in 2020, was not influenza.

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(It’s not the flu, bro!)

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No, Covid was new, and its dangers were uncertain, at least in February 2020.

On Feb. 5, the Italian government created the “Comitato Tecnino Scientifico” - the Scientific Technical Committee (sometimes called the Technical Scientific Committee) - to advise it on Covid. The committee initially had about a dozen members, including the president of Italy’s Istituto Superiore di Sanità, its top medical research organization.

The government was not obligated to follow the committee’s recommendations, but it usually did, as a 2022 review explained:

The TSC is constantly consulted by the Government on sensitive issues… Government decision-making has largely relied on the TSC recommendations, explicitly referring to them in public announcements. This occurred especially during the first two [Covid] waves, when harsh measures were taken.

Italy was not alone in having a quasi-governmental scientific advisory panel for Covid, of course. The best-known was probably Britain’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, or SAGE, which actually predated Covid. (Neil Ferguson was a SAGE member, though he quit in May 2020, after a British newspaper exposed how he had violated lockdown rules to sleep with his married girlfriend.)

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(152 infections. And one lockdown.)

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But scientists in Italy - and the ministers who considered their recommendations - were operating in the shadow of a unique prosecution.

At 3:32 a.m., on April 6, 2009, a quake struck L'Aquila, a pleasant town of 70,000 in the central Italian highlands. The temblor registered 5.9 on the Richter scale. It should hardly have been devastating.

Instead, over 300 residents of L’Aquila and surrounding towns died, probably due to old and shoddy construction. “In California, an earthquake like this one would not have killed a single person,” an Italian official said the day after the quake.

But prosecutors chose not to take on powerful and politically connected developers or town officials for building flaws. They focused on a different target - six scientists and a government official who were part of group called the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks.

Small quakes had rocked the area around L’Aquila for months, alarming residents. At a meeting in the town on March 31, 2009, the seven downplayed the risk that the shaking was a sign of a bigger earthquake. The region is seismically active, and small earthquakes are common.

A year after the quake, prosecutors charged the seven members of the commission with manslaughter for failing to warn the town it might be coming. The indictments prompted an outcry from scientists, especially geologists. More than 5,000 of them signed a letter to the President of Italy, saying they had no way to predict exactly where or when earthquakes would occur and that asking them to do so was wrong:

The scientific community involved in earthquake science urges the Italian government… to support earthquake preparedness and risk mitigation rather than prosecuting scientists for failing to do something they cannot do yet - predict earthquakes.

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(But did thee feel the earth move?)

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Nonetheless, the prosecution moved forward.

And on October 22, 2012, following a trial that lasted over a year, Judge Marco Bill found the seven defendants guilty and sentenced them to six years in prison each, fined them over $10 million, and banned them from working for the government.

Two years later, an Italian appeals court overturned the convictions for the six scientists and reduced the sentence of the government official to two years and ordered it suspended.

Still, Italy’s prosecutors and courts had sent scientists and government officials a powerful message. If they failed to anticipate or warn of potential natural disasters, they faced the real possibility of criminal charges and prison time.

It was against this backdrop that the Scientific Technical Committee - and Italian ministers - met in February 2020 to consider what to do about Sars-Cov-2 as hospitals in northern Italy began to report their first Covid cases.

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Is anyone surprised, then, that Italian authorities moved very fast to lockdown - and to treat Covid patients quickly and aggressively?

And given that Covid spreads quickly in hospitals and Italian physicians aggressively intubated patients, is it any wonder that deaths in Italy then exploded in early March? (Of course, in putting patients on ventilators, Italian doctors were only following the protocols that China had been so happy to give the world.)

This dynamic was clear as early as March 21, 2020, when an Italian physician wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that:

We are learning that hospitals might be the main Covid-19 carriers, as they are rapidly populated by infected patients, facilitating transmission to uninfected patients. Patients are transported by our regional system, which also contributes to spreading the disease as its ambulances and personnel rapidly become vectors…

[Sars-Cov-2-] is not particularly lethal, but it is very contagious. The more medicalized and centralized the society, the more widespread the virus.

And by mid-April, physicians had realized that invasive ventilation - especially at high air pressure - was actually contraindicated for many Covid patients. As a doctor told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in a piece headlined “Ventilators are being overused on COVID-19 patients, world-renowned critical care specialist says,”

"We started with a one-size-fits-all attitude, which didn't pay off… Now we try to delay intubation as much as possible."

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By then, though the world had learned two lessons from Italy.

Lockdowns were not just necessary, but possible. And they were not just possible, but necessary.

As Neil Ferguson explained on March 17, 2020, the heavy use of ventilators and stress on hospitals in Italy was a key reason he had increased his estimates for the damage Covid was likely to cause. And the infamous Report 9 from Ferguson and Imperial College London - made public on March 16 - had become the template that governments worldwide used to justify lockdowns.

In other words, the call was coming from inside the house all along.

Probably March 2020 would have played out just the same even if Italy hadn’t moved so fast.

The hysteria was certainly building even before Ferguson released his report. The first reported American death, on Feb. 29, became news worldwide. And maybe once the epidemic hit New York City in force, the response would have been the same.

But maybe not. Maybe health bureaucrats and governments would have been a little more reluctant to violate democratic norms if Italy hadn’t moved. Maybe the public would have become a little better informed about the actual risks of Covid as the fake videos showing people collapsing on the street in China receded.

It’s impossible to be sure. As those Los Angeles philosophers The Eagles once explained,

We may lose, and we may win
But we will never be here again

We can’t run the machine in reverse. All we can say for sure is that the dominoes fell fast and hard in March 2020.

And Italy was first.