Lots of people seem to think that there is something unique about Italy which has made it worse there.
There almost certainly isn't; the pandemic has progressed at the same rate everywhere, give or take, unless stringent social distancing, and/or test and trace measures are put in place.
Different bits of Italy are quite different. So a huge number of deaths were from Lombardia (there have also been a very large number of deaths in ER/MAR/PIE), which at the time was probably the worst place on earth for the coronavirus up until that point. Unfortunately that may not be the case any more and we will find that out in the next 3-4 days to a week or not.
A second very big problem with the graph in terms of making comparisons with Italy is this language around lockdown. The national lockdown in Italy doesn't have as much bearing on some bits of the graph as people think. There were two earlier "lockdowns" that aren't on the graph (I'm not saying that a national one isn't a good idea to stop the spread) and sets of measures. If you do comparisons between different countries what one calls a lockdown others call "measures". There were three lots of measures and some will argue that Italy's full lockdown was only implemented last week essentially (this is what I'd argue). Additionally on top of the lockdown Italy has "quarantined" areas well after this and rather late. A question, if Italy has quarantines after a lockdown, doesn't that rather suggest that measures aren't being stuck to or aren't quite as robust as what people say?
Additionally with Italy if you go on testing regime at a certain point, unfortunately Italy's testing regime's been quite poor. This isn't a great argument for other governments in my opinion because countries that are 2-3 weeks behind should bloody well know better. Italy is still only doing 17000-25,000 tests a day. Our government in a groundhog day moment this morning are reported to have said that yes they are actually only doing 6000 PCR tests a day (this is true), but they hope to get up to 25,000 PCR tests a day by four week's time. Yes, you read that right. Spain also seems to have totally and utterly screwed up testing in the early bits which has resulted in a brave move (or by other accounts no choice move) by the government to roll the dice and buy in antibody tests.
So in summary you can draw almost any conclusion you want about Italy glossing at the figures.
1. Little testing and a runaway cluster that went largely undetected is why Italy's in the place it is
2. Italy was very late to have an actual lockdown in terms of social distancing measures and compliance (a view not often voiced)
3. Italy didn't do many tests even as the virus progressed (c.f. other countries like singapore).
In Italy itself no1 is popular, no2 is not a popular view at all although in recent days gaining traction and no3 is not a popular view at all. Not that popularity tells you which one is the more applicable one.
