Northern Italy has taken an aggressive response to the spread of the virus, testing and quarantining people with and without symptoms, locking down 11 towns and more than 50,000 people as officials desperately seek to seal the virus off from the rest of the Italy.

[Read: ‘The face of the coronavirus’: A Hong Kong student shunned in Italy.]

But as the burden of the crisis weighed on Lombardy, the measures in the region have also divided families, damaged businesses and created the sense that Italy is sacrificing the few to protect the many, just as some countries around the world are trying to protect themselves from Italy.

As the virus spreads, the situation inside the locked-down towns and on the ambiguous — and sometimes porous — borders between the free and the quarantined offers a potential preview of what may come if countries, including the United States, choose to confront the virus with a similar hard line.

“They sacrificed us,” said Monica Grandi, 33, who works in a butcher shop outside the red zone and who walked with her toddler on the quarantined side of the border, where the family lives. She said the country looked upon them as infected pariahs. It made no sense that the neighboring town “a stone’s throw away” wasn’t locked down. “Why us and not them?”