History GodzillaThreshold / RealLife

** Both chemotherapy and radiation treatment are poisonous and can cause significant side effects, such as an elevated risk of secondary cancers, bone marrow destruction, hearing loss, or brain damage. But when the patient's cancer is going to kill them if it goes untreated, these harsh therapies may be their only hope for survival.

* In a strange subversion of this trope, Nazi Germany didn't itself pass the Godzilla Threshold until late in the war, well beyond the point where it would do any good. The perceived weakness of their enemies combined with the string of early victories convinced the Germans that the war could be won with only a partial economic mobilization. Such investments as long-range heavy bombers and a nuclear weapons program were never seriously considered because a "short" war would have no need for such things. The Nazis also never broke with tradition and tapped their female population to work in the factories as it was deemed more important for them to raise the next generation of Nazi super-children. Despite all the heavy bombing, Nazi war production only reached its peak in 1944(!) after all the slack industrial capacity was finally turned over to the war effort and after the FascistButInefficient prior organization of the economy got replaced by the -- equally ruthless but at least somewhat competent -- Albert Speer.

* Both houses of the U.S. Congress have the power of "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_Congress#Inherent_contempt inherent contempt]]": to jail a witness for refusing to comply with their subpoenas ... ''without'' the involvement of the other two branches of government (normally, that compliance is enforced through the courts, which takes longer). It has only been used once, by the Senate in the 1930s; [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurney_v._MacCracken the Supreme Court upheld it]].
* Sino-Vietnamese relations have been historically ''turbulent'' -- that is to say, China attempts to invade Vietnam nearly once every dynasty. The threshold was crossed when Phan Bội Châu struck up an alliance with the Kuomintang to get Vietnam out of the Vichy French regime's hands. China later became a very important strategic ally to Vietnam in the ensuing fight (the Indochina War and Vietnam War) in an EnemyMine situation, with the Communist Bloc in a united front. Four years after the fall of Saigon/Vietnamese reunification, the Chinese and Vietnamese went right back to shooting at each other.
* Typically, when a computer company ceases support for an operating system, that's it: no more updates, and no more tech support. Microsoft, however, bucked the trend with Windows XP, an operating system they discontinued support for in 2008 and released patches for it; first, in 2014 when a serious security vulnerability was discovered in Internet Explorer, a web browser; again when the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WannaCry_ransomware_attack Wannacry trojan reared its ugly head in May 2017]], encrypting countless computers and hitting hospitals and police computer systems across the globe; and once more in 2019, when a vulnerability similar to the one Wannacry exploited was discovered. This was done because XP was still used in so many systems across the world, both embedded systems and actual [=PCs=].
* For the American federal political system, two words: constitutional convention. There's only ever been one before, that replaced the Articles of Confederation with the United States Constitution.[[note]]The Twenty-First Amendment was ratified by the states by means of conventions and not through the state legislatures; however, this was after it had been proposed by Congress through the regular channels and as such the conventions were ''solely'' on whether to ratify the proposed amendment.[[/note]] While plenty of people have proposed holding another convention to update the Constitution, there's never been a serious movement to do so because everyone is terrified of what the new Constitution might look like based on who holds and attends it. If one were to be held, it would an admission by all sides that American politics are hopelessly broken beyond repair and the only possible solution is to throw the current system away and start from scratch.

** The TwentyFifthAmendment. Adopted after John F. Kennedy's assassination led people to recall how William [=McKinley=] had been in a coma for over a month following his before he died, and how the Constitution was silent on how to handle situations where the President, while not dead, was incapacitated. Technically, only in that situation should the clause where the Cabinet can unanimously remove the President from office, at least temporarily, be invoked. But it's not explicitly limited to that, and its potential for a coup has been noted and used quite a bit in fiction.
* As noted on the BannedInChina/UnitedStates page, the United States values free speech highly and takes a fairly hard line against any form of censorship from the government with one major exception: [[PaedoHunt child pornography]]. Child porn is practically the only form of speech and media that that is mostly completely illegal to create, consume, or disseminate, something that the courts have consistently upheld in spite of the First Amendment, owing to the fact that its mere existence requires committing [[RapeIsASpecialKindOfEvil extreme harm]] against [[WouldHurtAChild extremely vulnerable people.]]
* In parliamentary democracies there are two moves that invoke this trope:

* Locusts. Old school but still Armageddon to farmers if a swarm manages to grow to Biblical proportions. Crop loss is often expected to be 100%. Methods used to combat locust swarms are usually using enough poison to kill every living thing in the area... except the locust, whose numbers will take a dent but as a hive being several miles wide and thus, can move around, over, or through the poisoned areas. Worse, it was only in 2009 that scientists even figured out what causes locust swarms to appear. Locusts are grasshoppers -- the same grasshoppers that are living in the area already. But if their numbers grow too large, this causes them to literally morph into locusts, swarm, and start eating ''everything in sight.''
* Fire. A sufficiently big fire will turn anything in its path into a smoldering ruin and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. Fires can get so bad, that perhaps the only way to deal with them is to set your OWN fire in the hope that your fire will consume enough fuel/air to fight the original fire. Of course, things CAN go wrong where the fire just merges into one [[FromBadToWorse Super Fire]] or even worse kicks off a firestorm which are so intense they create their own winds and literally suck you into the inferno.

** In an attempt to fight the fires set in the wake of the San Francisco 1906 Earthquake, the same technique as Chicago was used, but all the people experienced in doing this were dead, and the demolished buildings would themselves catch fire (proper demolition techniques would collapse the building on itself in such a way that most potential fires would be smothered), making things worse. At least 80% of the damage to the city was fire damage and not direct earthquake damage.
** Lighting backfires (which burn towards the original fire, consuming all the fuel) is still a technique in use for fighting forest or brushfires. Setting backfires is reportedly as much art as science, and as previously mentioned is in no way guaranteed to work, making it a controversial tactic at best. Conversely, as a number of countries have learned the hard way (the US included) the absolute worst forest fire management policy is to stamp them all out as fast as possible. This leads to a build-up of fuel until it reaches the stage where it is no longer possible to suppress further fires, resulting in a titanic wildfire, such as the 1988 Yellowstone fire. The better option is to allow natural fires of limited scale to burn, suppressing only fires of large size or human origin. This allows a safe burn-off of the naturally accumulating fuel[[note]]In an example of just how natural forest fires are, some plants' seeds actually do not burst out of their seed pods to start growing until exposed to the high heat of a fire, thus causing them to wait to grow until fire has cleared out all the competition[[/note]].
** Sometimes the threshold for fire can be crossed before the fire even starts. After the Americans started their fire-bombing raids against Japan (causing far more destruction and casualties than even the nuclear bombs would later on), the government in Kyoto ordered two large firebreaks to be created in the city by demolishing two wide strips of the city perpendicular to the river (which itself formed another firebreak). Those firebreaks still exist to this day in the form of a pair of wide avenues, alongside some of the oldest urban buildings in Japan (the war ended before Kyoto could be bombed, meaning the firebreaks were ultimately not necessary. In a kind of Black Comedy/Irony, Kyoto ''was'' in fact at one point seriously discussed as a bombing target - for the atomic bombs that were ultimately dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and for which the sheer destructiveness of the explosion would have rendered firebreaks irrelevant).
** Using large explosions on huge fires that can't be put out by conventional means (like oil rig fires). The physics behind it is explosions create a void of air, starving the fire of oxygen.
* Culling. As stupid as killing an entire farm of livestock or entire yield of crops because ONE animal/batch was found sick sounds, it's because of this trope that it is done. Depending on what the animal was sick with, Avian Flu, Swine Flu, SARS, or just plain old Foot and Mouth, it is often seen as a good idea to use the Godzilla Option early rather than wait for it to become a Godzilla Necessity. Because as wasteful as culling perfectly good stock is, the potential losses from not doing so are just too great to risk.
** In the early 2000s in Wisconsin, chronic wasting disease (the deer equivalent of mad cow disease) was starting to spread and become a problem. If left unchecked, the disease risked wiping out the deer population to the point where it may not recover. The Wisconsin DNR first tried to find a cure for the disease, or at least find what was causing it in the first place in hopes of preventing further infections. The methods didn't work, so they had no choice: They extended deer season by a week and ordered for hunters in the state to shoot more deer than usually allowed in order to thin the numbers to extremely low populations (and to make sure that nobody consumed the infected deer). Thanks to careful monitoring by the DNR, the deer would recover to normal populations within a few years, and now the disease is barely even a problem anymore.
** In 2001, when a single case of foot and mouth was detected at an Irish farm, not only were all the animals at said farm culled but the ''Irish Special Forces'' were sent in to kill all the wildlife in the area that could potentially be infected.

* The TropeNamer is a nuclear metaphor. In fact, Godzilla started as a purely antagonistic force and a metaphor of having a nuke used against you then became a metaphor for the idea of having to use a nuclear weapon once it was realized it would be cool if he fought other monsters.

** It was feared that the measures -- including the stay-at-home orders and nonessential business closures -- taken to limit the spread of COVID-19, would bring about another Great Depression. This was seen as ''preferable'' to allowing the disease to run unchecked.

** Psychosurgery is still used today for extreme cases of depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder among others. When first described, lobotomy was seen as progress so much its inventor, António Egas Moniz received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949.

** In the early 2000s in Wisconsin, Chronic Wasting Disease (the Deer equivalent of Mad Cow) was starting to spread and become a problem. If left unchecked, the disease risked wiping out the deer population to the point where it may not recover. The Wisconsin DNR first tried to find a cure for the disease, or at least find what was causing it in the first place in hopes of preventing further infections. The methods didn't work, so they had no choice: They extended Deer Season by a week and ordered for hunters in the state to shoot more deer than usually allowed in order to thin the numbers to extremely low populations (and to make sure that nobody consumed the infected deer). Thanks to careful monitoring by the DNR, the deer would recover to normal populations within a few years, and now the disease is barely even a problem anymore.

* For patrol officers in the United States, any situation that requires going to the squad car and grabbing the shotgun or AR-15 carbine is this. It is typically in response to the worst possible situations an officer can encounter, such as a suspect with an automatic weapon shooting at them, or anything else a sidearm isn't capable of handling. ([[SWATTeam Calling in S.W.A.T]] can also be this, but S.W.A.T teams are also called to situations that simply require additional protection, such as high-risk warrants and security for high-profile operations like major sporting events or visiting dignitaries.) That's the ''theory'', at least; police departments all over the US are regularly accused of excessive force, particularly against unarmed citizens.

* During three successive years of abnormally low drought in the mid-2010s, the city of Cape Town, South Africa, began imposing stricter and stricter restrictions on water use—no watering lawns or filling pools, things like that. But by late 2017 the rains had not returned and the city's reservoirs were mostly open sand pits. So, the city announced that if the situation continued, there would have to be a Day Zero, when it would stop supplying water to everywhere but it's downtown and essential services (like hospitals) elsewhere in the city. As of January 2018 that date was set for April; fortunately, the citizens' compliance with the water restrictions and some rain refilling the reservoirs has, as of this writing, pushed Day Zero into 2019 and averted the trope.

* Typically, when a computer company ceases support for an operating system, that's it: no more updates, and no more tech support. Microsoft, however, bucked the trend with Windows XP, an operating system they discontinued support for in 2008 and released patches for it; first, in 2014 when a serious security vulnerability was discovered in Internet Explorer, a web browser; again when the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WannaCry_ransomware_attack Wannacry trojan reared its ugly head in May 2017]], encrypting countless computers and hitting hospitals and police computer systems across the globe; and once more in 2019, when a vulnerability similar to the one Wannacry exploited was discovered. This was done because XP was still used in so many systems across the world, both embedded systems and actual PC's.
* For the American federal political system, two words: constitutional convention. There's only ever been one before that replaced the Articles of Confederation with the United States Constitution.[[note]]The Twenty-First Amendment was ratified by the states by means of conventions and not through the state legislatures; however, this was after it had been proposed by Congress through the regular channels and as such the conventions were ''solely'' on whether to ratify the proposed amendment.[[/note]] While plenty of people have proposed holding another convention to update the Constitution, there's never been a serious movement to do so because everyone is terrified of what the new Constitution might look like based on who holds and attends it. If one were to be held, it would an admission by all sides that American politics are hopelessly broken beyond repair and the only possible solution is to throw the current system away and start from scratch.

* As noted on the BannedInChina/UnitedStates page, the United States values free speech highly takes a fairly hard line against any form of censorship from the government with one major exception: [[PaedoHunt child pornography]]. Child porn is practically the only form of speech and media that that is mostly completely illegal to create, consume, or disseminate, something that the courts have consistently upheld in spite of the First Amendment, owing to the fact that its mere existence requires committing [[RapeIsASpecialKindOfEvil extreme harm]] against [[WouldHurtAChild extremely vulnerable people.]]

And then in 2019 new British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had the Queen prorogue Parliament for longer than it usually was at the end of the summer, conveniently limiting the amount of time that Parliament sits before the October 31 Brexit deadline to a period that would allow a no-deal Brexit to go through without the opposition being able to prevent it, or even scrutinize whatever deal he could come up with.
* As the full extent of Larry Nassar's sexual abuse of his gymnast patients became clear, the US Olympic Committee was so disgusted by the way US Gymnastics had repeatedly looked the other way that it revoked US Gymnastics' status as the official sanctioning body for American international gymnastics.
* The Medellin Cartel headed by the infamous Pablo Escobar was [[NGOSuperpower so powerful]] in the '80-'90s. So powerful, they could afford to fight and take out the government itself. The supreme court, murdered. The president, assassinated. Policemen got a bounty on their head. A special incorruptible task force numbering 200 people, 30 were murdered within 2 weeks. Ultimately a shadowy vigilante group calling themselves 'Los Pepes' were the ones to dismantle his cocaine empire. They didn't care about the law, fighting Escobar's brutality with brutality. They were even likely to have received government assistance specifically to take down the infamous kingpin. You know you're past the Godzilla Threshold when the government itself sanctioned a vigilante group who'd PayEvilUntoEvil.
* Usually, when a company CEO steps down, usually that means it is permanent. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Disney gave former CEO Bob Iger informal control of the company to get it through the crisis, even though he won't hold the title of CEO, in order to ensure that Disney can come back stronger after the pandemic fades.

** The Điện Biên Phủ Campaign in 1954 marked the ending of the French Indochina Wars/Resistance against the French, at considerable cost. The Việt Minh were able to bring in artillery, which the French was completely unprepared for, because they dismissed out of hand the notion of the Việt Minh successfully transporting cannons and supplies through treacherous terrains. It took an incredible effort of bicycle-powered supply lines and soldiers risking death (many did, most famously Tô Vĩnh Diện, who threw himself beneath a runaway cannon). The Việt Minh ended up shooting fish in a barrel with those cannons, as the French headquarters were at the bottom of a basin, compared to a fishbowl or a hat.

* As a result of the UsefulNotes/WarOfTheTripleAlliance, Paraguay's population had dropped from somewhere between 450,000 and 900,000 to 220,000, of whom only 28,000 were adult males, while the country still engaged in a border dispute with Bolivia and expected to pay a large war indemnity. In this situation where Paraguay desperately needed a population boost not only poligamy was allowed in the otherwise strictly Catholic country, even ''priests'' were expected to have numerous children from multiple women.

* Another crossing of the threshold was [[MeaningfulName Operation Downfall]] -- if the Japanese hadn't surrendered, then the Allies would have launched the largest amphibious/naval operation in history: Hundreds of capital ships, thousands of aircraft, millions of men, chemical weapons, and, most chillingly of all ''[[NukeEm seven atom bombs]].'' (That's right -- the contemplated alternative to dropping two A-bombs was dropping ''seven''.) The estimated dead for the conquest of Japan was half a million for the US and 5+ million Japanese.\\

By way of illustration of the commitment of the US military to this plan, there was a standing order that the atomic bombs should be used as soon as they were "made ready". The expected rate was calculated to be three bombs per month up through at least November. At the time of the Japanese surrender, a third atomic bomb was being loaded for transport at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. When the surrender notice came in, the shipment was stopped and President Truman asserted that there was to be no further use of nuclear weapons without his direct approval.\\
\\
So many Purple Heart medals were made in anticipation of an invasion of Japan that the US military didn't start to run low until the 21st century.

The first fully effective treatment for syphilis was to literally burn it out of the patient's body by inducing a very strong fever, and the best way to do that is to give them '''malaria'''. It was a widely accepted treatment for a time (apparently into the 1950s), even netting its discoverer Julius Wagner-Jauregg a Nobel Prize in 1927.\\

* AncientRome had provisions for this during the Republic: when an enemy appeared invincible and on the verge of overrunning Rome, the Senate chose the man best suited to deal with that enemy and made him a dictator, giving him absolute power for six months and with no legal way to make him pay for anything he did during his term. It usually went well, as they would follow the example of {{Cincinnatus}}, who, upon defeating an enemy coalition that had surrounded the Roman army (thus prompting him being named dictator) within the first half of his term, resigned and returned to his farm, and, after being named dictator AGAIN to deal with a coup, he defeated the coup in one day and immediately resigned AGAIN. Then there are the two times that wasn't enough:

** Cardiopulmonary resuscitation involves forceful, sustained crushing force to the patient's chest, almost always resulting in multiple broken ribs (if done correctly) and quite possibly abdominal distension and aspiration pneumonia. It's an acceptable risk given that the patient is clinically dead, and every effort is now solely focused on keeping oxygenated blood pumping through the brain until the heart starts pumping again on its own. See [[UsefulNotes/CPRCleanPrettyReliable here]] on why CPR isn't necessarily as CleanPrettyReliable as fiction makes it out to be.

** Lighting backfires (which burn towards the original fire, consuming all the fuel) is still a technique in use for fighting forest or brushfires. Setting backfires is reportedly as much art as science, and as previously mentioned is in no way guaranteed to work, making it a controversial tactic at best. Conversely, as a number of countries have learned the hard way (the US included) the absolute worst forest fire management policy is to stamp them all out as fast as possible. This leads to a build-up of fuel until it reaches the stage where it is no longer possible to suppress further fires, resulting in a titanic wildfire, such as the 1988 Yellowstone fire. The better option is to allow natural fires of limited scale to burn, suppressing only fires of large size or human origin. This allows a safe burn-off of the naturally accumulating fuel[[note]]In an example of just how natural forst fires are, some plants' seeds actually do not burst out of their seed pods to start growing until exposed to the high heat of a fire, thus causing them to wait to grow until fire has cleared out all the competition[[/note]].

** Lighting backfires (which burn towards the original fire, consuming all the fuel) is still a technique in use for fighting forest or brushfires. Setting backfires is reportedly as much art as science, and as previously mentioned is in no way guaranteed to work, making it a controversial tactic at best. Conversely, as a number of countries have learned the hard way (the US included) the absolute worst forest fire management policy is to stamp them all out as fast as possible. This leads to a build-up of fuel until it reaches the stage where it is no longer possible to suppress further fires, resulting in a titanic wildfire, such as the 1988 Yellowstone fire. The better option is to allow natural fires of limited scale to burn, suppressing only fires of large size or human origin. This allows a safe burn-off of the naturally accumulating fuel.

** Executives at [=PepsiCo=], in considering possible competitive responses to their growth and success by archrival Coca-Cola during the early 1980s, were able to rule only one thing out: They were pretty sure that Coke would ''never'' consider changing the formula of their flagship drink. When Coke actually ''did'' that in April 1985, it wasn't a huge success from a PR perspective, as they were forced to bring the old flavor back just two months later. But they had sent a clear signal to Pepsi that there was ''nothing'' they wouldn't do to compete, as former company president Roger Enrico recalled years later.

* In retrospect, this is how the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978-79 has been viewed. While a hardline Communist government is not ideal (especially a hardline Communist government that [[UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar the United States and its allies had very recently lost a major war to]]), what the Vietnamese invasion and occupation replaced was unarguable ''[[NightmareFuel/TheKillingFields worse]]''.

** There exists a drug called Melarsoprol, often informally nicknamed by the layman's-terms description of its recipe: "Arsenic in Antifreeze". Yes, that's mixing two poisons, each lethal in different ways, and the resulting substance is still every bit as lethally toxic[[note]]5% to 9% die ''from the treatment''[[/note]], but it's the only consistently effective cure for African trypanosomiasis, also known as "sleeping-sickness", a parasitic disease caused by microbes that are spread by specific insect-bites, most famously the tsetse fly, that if left untreated is always fatal.

Communism clearly represented an existential threat to the United States. Through the mid-1960s, fully half the Federal government's total budget was for defense. This government spending was funded by upper-income marginal tax rates of 50-90%, something considered unthinkable today without the specter of global communism. Much like in World War 2, the United States took arms production UpToEleven, producing over 30,000 nuclear weapons and the bombers, missiles, and submarines needed to deliver them.

* AncientRome had provisions for this during the Republic: when an enemy appeared invincible and on the verge of overrunning Rome, the Senate chose the man best suited to deal with that enemy and made him a dictator, giving him absolute power for six months and with no legal way to make him pay for anything he did during his term. It usually went well, as they would follow the example of {{Cincinnatus}}, who, upon defeating an enemy coalition that had surrounded the Roman army (thus prompting him being named dictator) within the first half of his term, resigned and returned to his farm, and, after being named dictator AGAIN to deal with a coup, he defeated the coup in one day and immediately resigned AGAIN. Then there are the two times [[UpToEleven that wasn't enough]]:

** Because of the {{Conscription}} any civilian is potentially a soldier, and a very large fraction of the population has had military training and can potentially be called up as a member of the militia. Militia members are also allowed to keep their service rifles after their term ends. Prior to 2007, this was taken UpToEleven with the government providing each member of the militia with a sealed box with 50 rounds of ammunition -- just in case. Since 2007, all ammunition has been stored at military armories except for members of the military police and special rapid deployment reservist units.

* In a strange subversion of this trope, Nazi Germany didn't itself pass the Godzilla Threshold until late in the war, well beyond the point where it would do any good. The perceived weakness of their enemies combined with the string of early victories convinced the Germans that the war could be won with only a partial economic mobilization. Such investments as long-range heavy bombers and a nuclear weapons program were never seriously considered because a "short" war would have no need for such things. The Nazis also never broke with tradition and tapped their female population to work in the factories even though they were big believers in StayInTheKitchen as it was deemed more important for them to raise the next generation of Nazi super-children. Despite all the heavy bombing, Nazi war production only reached its peak in 1944(!) after all the slack industrial capacity was finally turned over to the war effort and after the FascistButInefficient prior organization of the economy got replaced by the -- equally ruthless but at least somewhat competent -- Albert Speer.

* In a strange subversion of this trope, Nazi Germany didn't itself pass the Godzilla Threshold until late in the war, well beyond the point where it would do any good. The perceived weakness of their enemies combined with the string of early victories convinced the Germans that the war could be won with only a partial economic mobilization. Such investments as long-range heavy bombers and a nuclear weapons program were never seriously considered because a "short" war would have no need for such things. The Nazis also never broke with tradition and tapped their female population to work in the factories as it was deemed more important for them to raise the next generation of Nazi super-children. Despite all the heavy bombing, Nazi war production only reached its peak in 1944(!) after all the slack industrial capacity was finally turned over to the war effort and after the FascistButInefficient prior organization of the economy got replaced by the -- equally ruthless but at least somewhat competent -- Albert Speer.

* Speaking of Godzilla Threshold moves to control epidemics, the [[UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic has seen many in an attempt to keep the disease from spreading:

* Speaking of Godzilla Threshold moves to control epidemics, the [[UsefulNotes COVID-19 pandemic has seen many in an attempt to keep the disease from spreading:

* Speaking of Godzilla Threshold moves to control epidemics, the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic has seen many in an attempt to keep the disease from spreading:
** Nearly all major sports leagues and sanctioning organizations around the developed world have suspended and postponed their seasons, and in some cases, most notably in the case of the "March Madness" U.S. college basketball tournaments, canceled them altogether (the NCAA, just to be extra safe, canceled all the ''spring'' sports championships as well, which wouldn't otherwise have been held for a couple of months).
** Large events such as the 2020 SXSW festival have been canceled. New York canceled its St. Patrick's Day parade for the first time in its 258-year history. Public schools have been closed.
** Early in the epidemic, China put the entire city of Wuhan, where the outbreak started, on lockdown ... no one could go out for all but the most essential reasons. This measure has been emulated by Italy and Spain as their caseloads exhaust available hospital space... yes, in the former case, an ''entire country'' of 60 million people generally must stay at home when possible.
** Flights between affected areas have been suspended.
** It was feared that the measures -- including the stay-at-home orders and nonessential business closures -- taken to limit the spread of COVID-19, may bring about another Great Depression. This was seen as ''preferable'' to allowing the disease to run unchecked.

* Speaking of Godzilla Threshold moves to control epidemics, the 2019-20 COVID-19 outbreak has seen many already in an attempt to keep the disease from spreading:

* The Lateran Pacts between Italy and the Vatican are about avoiding one: while they're not perfect for any of the two countries, the actions taken by Pius IX during the Wars of Italian Unification and the circumstances of Rome becoming the capital of Italy mean that without them the Pope would automatically be a prisoner of the Italian state and Rome would be ''illegally occupied'', among other things both sides want to avoid. Hence why Pope Pius XI signed them with UsefulNote/FascistItaly in spite of his ''massive'' opposition to Fascism, and why the Italian Republic included them in the same Constitution that bans the Fascist Party.