It's approaching the pinnacle of human conceit to dismiss "rotten luck" as a factor between ending up in Italy-scale devastation and avoiding it.

You need to go all the way back to the Italian Government's early response.

On January 31st, with zero dead, they suspended all flights to and from China. On February 3rd, zero dead, 11 thermal scanners were put in place in main airport in Rome and 3 scanners in Milan airport.

Bulk of the scanners in Rome targeted International arrivals (8 of the 11 in Terminal 3). Every passenger had temperature checked on arrival.

Italian government correctly stated they were the first country in Europe to implement these measures and they'd help keep Italians safe.

But the chain of events that led to that February 21st Lombardy cluster was actually happening in Italy long before those 'preemptive' Government responses were implemented. The virus was many steps ahead of even the earliest measures.

Be hard pressed to come up with more unlucky circumstances.

A 38-year-old asymptomatic person, carrying the virus for weeks. A super- healthy marathon runner. He ran 2 cross-country races while asymptomatic, putting him in close contact with hundreds of other fit young people.

Instead of starting with 1 infected person like in Ireland, or a small cluster, that Lombardy outbreak started with the diagnosis of 16 people in a massive cluster.

Worse, a lot of those people had been in contact with enormous amounts of people themselves.

Worse again, he went to the hospital on the 16th and (likely) due to his young age and overall fitness, they didn't even suspect coronavirus initially. So he infected nurses and doctors, who in turn infected patients, visitors of patients.

Before you know it, it's everywhere.

Italy took pretty concrete early measures - they just didn't work.

They were hit by a combination of bad luck in that the worst possible person got infected, wasn't showing any symptoms at all and it was too late by time symptoms showed up.

The difference between a healthcare system getting quickly overwhelmed - or incrementally pushed to the limit - is somewhat Governmental-readiness and reaction, mostly societal-response; but there's a heap of dumb luck involved in the type of people that get infected early.

Luck isn't just the kind of person who got infected early. It's also people being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Ireland's outbreak could easily have started far sooner down to something as trivial as a person ordering a pint at an airport bar instead of skipping it.

If that Italian didn't get infected, didn't run those races, didn't have such a healthy active lifestyle that brought him into contact with so many - maybe Italy's major outbreak starts 2 weeks after us and they'd have had our benefit of rapidly-increasing knowledge on the virus.

We can debate the action/inaction of any Government. We can argue over the effectiveness of mitigation measures. We can compare mortality rates and infection rates.

But when you're dealing with forces of nature - it helps to be lucky.