Covid-19’s first wave largely missed southern Italy. The second wave is hitting it hard.

Italy is about to test the value of 'flattening the curve.' When northern Italy became the epicenter of the pandemic in the spring, one urgent concern was that the country’s coronavirus outbreak would quickly spread to the less-prosperous south and overwhelm under-resourced regional health systems. That fear wasn’t realized. A strict nationwide lockdown largely contained the virus in the north and brought the outbreak under control. But now the virus is raging again, through Europe and through Italy, with a spike that is again hitting the north but this time also the south. In Campania, which includes Naples, the daily number of detected new cases is five times larger than March’s peak.