According to the Reuters article there were already 589 confirmed cases in Spain at that time, 202 of them in Madrid.
Since Spain did not react earlier I don't think it is right to say the following about Spain (not referring to Italy here): "Spain and Italy's government did not overreacted or downplayed the threat".
Spain was following the indications of the OMS at that point. The pandemic was not declared until March 11th, three days after Woman's Day.
By default, anyone can rally in Spain at any point. They don't seek authorization for the government, they have it by default. It can only be revoked and not granted. While there probably was some thought given to preventing the rallies, given what the OMS was saying at the time it looked like an over reaction. It was, of course, an error in hindsight, but I don't think it's indicative of a big failure of leadership.
The Spanish government did little or nothing before Saturday the 14th of March when the government decided to lock down the country, starting Sunday 15th of March. By that time there were 193 dead and more than 6000 cases in Spain according to: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/14/spain-governme...
So even when WHO (OMS) had declared a pandemic March 11th, there were no policies taking effect before March 15th.
Even I, that has never had any interest in epidemic diseases, started to follow the Sitraps from WHO almost daily from February 24th (even mentioned it in a comment on March 2nd, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22464056). Professionals for much longer I assume.
Saying that Spain didn't downplay the threat, as parent 'rumanator' was saying, is therefore not something I can agree with.
For extrangers: it's the vice-prime minister saying on tv that all women should go to the rallies because "it's a matter of live or death" to them. Indeed.
There are many facts that have been arising later, like ministry of health forbidding doctors to attend conventions, police acquiring masks massively and several medical agencies and organizations advicing against the rallies.
It was a typical case of management discarding what every technician under them was telling them for politics.
Edit 2: please don't adopt the typical partisan position with "the opposition was also organizing rallies". No they weren't. There was one party that had its national convention around the same days. Still, it isn't comparable. The government had the direct access to the official sources of information and ignored and hid them.
This isn't a right vs. left matter. More to the left is labour minister Ribera and she was correct to inform the public of how lockdown scenarios would affect workplaces. No good deed goes unpunished, everybody attacked her from all sides... until a few days later it became obvious that what she said was unavoidable.
In the right wing, Ayuso was correctly willing to wait a couple of weeks more to open Madrid, when her coalition partner Aguado forced her to ask for immediate unlock. Central government didn't consent, so change of position was useless, but now there's a left for lockdown, right for unlock division, that's it.
I won't go into the masks issue. It's too painful to just recall.
What do you mean by encouraging? I was out of the country at the time so maybe I missed something.
To be clear, I think the 8th was a mistake. But at the same time, the opposition was organizing rallies and those were not stopped either. There were also massive football matches. At the time, I think the government simply underestimated what was going on, in a large part because the OMS guidance wasn't prudent enough. The fact the 8M aligns with the government may have entered into it, but it's not clear given other events that happened around those dates.
This is blatantly and shamelessly false. On the day of the rally there were zero reported deaths by covid19 in the entire country, let alone Madrid. By then the total number of confirmed cases in the entire country barely reached 1k.
There isn't a single nation or government in the history of humanity that decided to lock down an entire country just because there was 1k cases of what was described by then as a mere atypical form of viral pneumonia.
By March 8th, they had been 3k deaths in Wuhan. It was blatantly obvious by that time that Covid-19 was dangerous, and also that the testing situation was such that no one knew how widespread the virus was. Since the strict Spanish lockdown started just 6 days later, it seems clear that not halting the march was a big mistake, although it seems unclear how many were actually infected there.
On the day of the rally there were zero reported deaths by covid19 in the entire country
But the situation in Italy, our neighbours, was clear enough, no need to be Nostradamus.
There isn't a single nation or government in the history of humanity that decided to lock down an entire country...
You're very good attacking a strawman. Between encouraging massive rallies of hundred of thousands of persons packed in the streets and locking down an entire country, you know, there's a whole lot of intermediate points.
...just because there was 1k cases of what was described by then as a mere atypical form of viral pneumonia.
It makes no sense to criticize a democratic government to impose emergency measures a kin of totalitarian and oppressive regimes just because there were barely 1k cases of an atypical pneumonia which even the World Health Organization claimed that wouldn not spread between humans.
By March 8th 2020 there were 366 deaths in Italy and over 7000 registered infected, according to: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/
The same day the Spanish government let hundred of thousands take part in the 8th of March International Women's Day rallies all over Spain: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-womens-day-spain-idUSKBN2...
According to the Reuters article there were already 589 confirmed cases in Spain at that time, 202 of them in Madrid.
Since Spain did not react earlier I don't think it is right to say the following about Spain (not referring to Italy here): "Spain and Italy's government did not overreacted or downplayed the threat".