  This paper estimates the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions -
mainly, the lockdown - on the COVID-19 mortality rate for the case of Italy,
the first Western country to impose a national shelter-in-place order. We use a
new estimator, the Augmented Synthetic Control Method (ASCM), that overcomes
some limits of the standard Synthetic Control Method (SCM). The results are
twofold. From a methodological point of view, the ASCM outperforms the SCM in
that the latter cannot select a valid donor set, assigning all the weights to
only one country (Spain) while placing zero weights to all the remaining. From
an empirical point of view, we find strong evidence of the effectiveness of
non-pharmaceutical interventions in avoiding losses of human lives in Italy:
conservative estimates indicate that for each human life actually lost, in the
absence of lockdown there would have been on average other 1.15, the policy
saved in total 20,400 human lives.
