A man and his dogs walk near Areopagus Hill in Athens. The effectiveness of Greece’s lockdown has been a welcome surprise. (Petros Giannakouris/AP)

ATHENS — Greece has one of Europe's oldest populations, a health-care system weakened by a decade of austerity, and a long history of skirting government orders.

As the coronavirus spread around the globe, there was alarm in Athens that those factors might combine into a monumental human tragedy.