CARPAY: COVID-19 in Italy, what actually happened?

John Carpay, B.A., LL.B, is president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (jccf.ca) A friend and I were discussing the pros and cons of lockdowns when he exclaimed “But just look at what happened in Italy!” as an argument to justify lockdowns. His argument was that COVID-19 inflicted massive carnage on Italy and therefore, even if lockdowns caused a lot of harm, they were worth trying, in order to prevent “what happened in Italy” from also happening in Canada.What happened in Italy in 2020 is what has happened around the world, every day and every year, since time immemorial: people died.Italy’s aging population peaked at 60.8 million in 2015, and has been slowly declining since then. As Italy’s population has aged, the death rate has increased slightly every year. When too few babies are born in a country, that country’s death rate (the annual number of deaths per 1,000 people) rises.From 2009 to 2023, there has been no significant change in Italian death rates.From 2009 to 2019, the death rate in Italy rose from 9.815 per 1,000 people to 10.566 per 1,000 people. In 2020, it rose slightly to 10.651 per 1,000 people, and continued rising each year thereafter, reaching 10.953 deaths in 2023, and 11,026 deaths as of mid-2024.If COVID-19 was an unusually deadly killer, not just a bad annual flu, then death rates in Italy and around the world would have been significantly higher in 2020 than in 2019. This is not the case. There was nothing remarkable about the very small increase in the death rate in Italy from 2019 to 2020.However, politicians and their media allies frightened people around the world by repeatedly showing photos and video clips of dead and dying Italians, along with body bags containing the deceased. These visual images did not shed any light on how many people were dying, whether more people were dying than previously, or what people were dying from. Scary visual images create massive fear while imparting only minimal and selective facts. Like so many other Canadians, my friend who fretted about “what happened in Italy” was impacted emotionally by pictures of sick, dying, and dead Italians, in combination with panicked journalists claiming that something very unusual was taking place. These scary images were shown over and over again on television and the internet, for weeks and months on end, around the world.For a country with an aging population and a death rate that rises gradually each year, 2020 was a normal year in Italy, even with COVID-19. The media did not report on this fact. Doing so would have made its COVID-19 coverage rather boring, even irrelevant.The sensationalist “journalism” that was inflicted on us in 2020 is what one would expect from lurid gossip magazines seeking to shock and entertain, not from ethical and responsible reporters seeking to inform the public about facts and reality. The media suggested, incorrectly but very effectively, that astronomically high numbers of Italians were dying of COVID-19, when this was not the case. With the arrival of COVID-19 in 2020, the media was certain not to let facts get in the way of a good story. The media’s story was so good that it kept billions of people glued to their computer screens and smart-phones for the next several years!What happened in Italy was replicated throughout the world: trends in death rates did not change significantly from 2019 to 2020, proving previously projected COVID-19 deaths to be wild exaggerations, especially those propagated by Dr. Neil Ferguson and the World Health Organization, which formed the basis of much of the lockdown policies implemented throughout the world.Sadly, the highly misleading media reports about “what happened in Italy” impacted not only the average member of the Canadian public. In constitutional challenge to lockdowns in Manitoba, Gateway v. Manitoba, the judge actually mentioned “what had happened in places like Italy” as part of his rationale for upholding the Manitoba government’s violation of Charter freedoms.The judge made no reference to Italian data or Italian death rates when using “what happened in Italy” as part of his justification of lockdowns in Manitoba.Contrary to the panicked and inaccurate assertions about COVID-19 that are found throughout the Gateway v. Manitoba ruling, the death rate in Manitoba has remained virtually unchanged in the past 30 years. You would never have known it from watching the daily news in 2020, but COVID-19 did not alter the death rate in Manitoba. Manitoba’s death rate from 1993 to 2023 has remained very constant: between eight and nine deaths per 1,000 people, per year. Manitoba’s death rate in 2019-2020 (COVID-19’s first year) was slightly higher than in the previous year, but also lower than the death rate in 2002-03, and lower than the death rate in 2022-23.Canadian death rates as a whole, based on the government’s own data, show the same pattern as Italy and Manitoba. Contrary to the daily media fearmongering through use of frightening images, death numbers in Canada were not impacted significantly by Covid. In the past 40 years, we’ve gone from seeing seven deaths per 1,000 Canadians per year in 1983 to eight deaths per 1,000 Canadians per year in 2024, due to declining birth rates and an aging population.As in Italy and Manitoba, COVID-19’s impact on Canadian death rates was negligible. From 2019 to 2020, the death rate in Canada did rise slightly from 7.758 to 7.803. However, the death rate continued to rise thereafter, to 7.849 in 2021, 7.894 in 2022, 7.940 in 2023, and 8.006 in 2024.In Gateway v. Manitoba and other court rulings across Canada, governments did not present evidence to support their claim that COVID-19 was an extraordinary or unusual health menace. Governments simply asserted the claim, and judges believed it. The governments’ own data — for the provinces and for Canada as a whole — shows that COVID-19 was not the unusually deadly killer that politicians and the media were making it out to be. In spite of that, and tragically, some Canadian judges have simply repeated the false media narrative in their court rulings, upholding lockdowns as justified violations of our Charter rights and freedoms.John Carpay, B.A., LL.B, is president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (jccf.ca)