Originally published 2020-03-18. Dates, ages and announcements in this article refer to March 2020.
In mid-March 2020, while Italy was the European country hardest hit by COVID-19, the video channel A Thing By asked people in quarantine to record a message for the person they had been ten days earlier. The result is a short, quiet film of Italians at home telling their past selves what they wish they had known: that the virus was not just a distant problem, and that ordinary routines were about to stop.
The video is embedded below. This page explains when it was made, what was happening in Italy at the time, and why its message mattered to viewers in countries that were then only a few days behind.
Watch: messages to a self ten days earlier
The idea is simple. Each person speaks to camera as if talking to themselves around the start of March. Many describe how they first treated the news as an exaggeration, carried on going out, and assumed it would mainly affect other people. Then they describe what came next: closed shops, empty streets, worry for older relatives and the strange experience of days spent entirely indoors.
What makes the film effective is that nobody lectures. The speakers are not doctors or politicians. They are ordinary residents admitting how quickly their own assumptions changed, which is often more persuasive than official advice.
Italy in March 2020: how fast things moved
Italy recorded its first confirmed cases on 31 January 2020, when two tourists from China tested positive in Rome. For about three weeks the situation seemed contained. Then, on 21 February, clusters of local transmission were found in Lombardy and Veneto, and the first deaths followed the next day.
The government responded in stages. On 8 March Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte placed all of Lombardy and 14 other northern provinces under quarantine. The next day, 9 March, the lockdown was extended to the whole country, affecting about 60 million people. Schools, most shops and public gatherings were shut, and people could leave home only for work, health reasons or essential errands such as buying food.
By the time this article first appeared on 18 March, figures reported for the previous day put Italy at about 31,500 confirmed cases and roughly 2,500 deaths. On 19 March the army was sent to Bergamo, one of the worst-hit cities, because local services could no longer cope with the number of dead. Those images, including military trucks carrying coffins, became some of the defining pictures of the early pandemic.
“Ten days behind”: what the comparison meant
At the time, commentators often said that countries such as Spain, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States were roughly a week or ten days behind Italy. The phrase was a rough way of saying that the early growth of cases elsewhere looked similar to Italy’s curve a short time before.
It was never an exact forecast. Each country had different testing, different population ages, different hospital capacity and different timing of restrictions, so their epidemics did not follow identical paths. The useful part of the comparison was the warning: what felt unreal in one place could become everyday reality in another within days. That is exactly the gap the video tried to close.
Why hindsight messages resonate
Psychologists have long noted that people find it hard to react to risks that grow exponentially. When numbers double every few days, the early figures look small and the later figures arrive with a shock. A message from someone who has already lived through the next stage cuts through that difficulty in a way that charts often cannot.
The film also offered something else that was badly needed in March 2020: a sense of solidarity. People who were frightened and isolated chose to spend their time recording advice for strangers in other countries. Many viewers responded to that generosity as much as to the warning itself.
Lessons that still hold
- Act on early signals. Restrictions and precautions tend to work best when they start before hospitals are full, not after.
- Protect the most vulnerable. Older people and those with serious illnesses were at much higher risk, and many of the speakers worried most about grandparents and parents.
- Rely on official health guidance. Advice changed as scientists learned more, so the best source was always the current guidance from national health authorities and the World Health Organization.
- Look after mental health. Long periods at home were hard on many families. Staying in contact by phone or video helped, and anyone struggling should talk to a doctor.
Reading the video today
This film is a record of a specific moment, not a guide to the present. The case numbers, comparisons and fears it reflects belong to March 2020, before vaccines and treatments were available and before scientists understood the virus well. Italy went on to record many millions of cases over the following years.
Seen now, it works best as history: a reminder of how quickly ordinary life can change, how people tried to help one another across borders, and how valuable a clear, honest warning from someone a few steps ahead can be.
For more on the early pandemic, see our pieces on the Chinese nurses whose faces were marked by long shifts in protective equipment and the satellite images of burial trenches in Iran.
Sources: Video by A Thing By on YouTube; Wikipedia: COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. Case and death figures for 17 March 2020 are those reported by Italian authorities at the time.
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