Assessing the effect of containment measures on the spatio-temporal dynamic of COVID-19 in Italy
- PDF / 3,809,354 Bytes
- 14 Pages / 547.087 x 737.008 pts Page_size
- 115 Downloads / 221 Views
ORIGINAL PAPER
Assessing the effect of containment measures on the spatio-temporal dynamic of COVID-19 in Italy Maria Michela Dickson
· Giuseppe Espa
· Diego Giuliani
· Flavio Santi
· Lucia Savadori
Received: 27 April 2020 / Accepted: 28 July 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This paper aims at investigating empirically whether and to what extent the containment measures adopted in Italy had an impact in reducing the diffusion of the COVID-19 disease across provinces. For this purpose, we extend the multivariate timeseries model for infection counts proposed in Paul and Held (Stat Med 30(10):118–1136, 2011) by augmenting the model specification with B-spline regressors in order to account for complex nonlinear spatiotemporal dynamics in the propagation of the disease. The results of the model estimated on the time series of the number of infections for the Italian provinces show that the containment measures, despite being globally effective in reducing both the spread of contagion and its self-sustaining dynamics, have had nonlinear impacts across provinces. The impact has been relatively stronger in the northern local areas, where the disease occurred earlier and with a greater incidence. This evidence may be explained by the shared popular belief that the contagion was not a close-to-home problem but rather restricted to a few distant northern areas, which, in turn, might have led individuals to adhere less strictly to containment measures and lockdown rules. M. M. Dickson · G. Espa · D. Giuliani (B)· L. Savadori Department of Economics and Management, University of Trento, Via Inama 5, 38122 Trento, TN, Italy e-mail: [email protected] F. Santi Department of Economics, University of Verona, Verona, VR, Italy
Keywords COVID-19 · Italy · Spatio-temporal model · Spatial dependence · Quarantine
1 Introduction At the time of writing, the COVID-19 pandemic represents a worldwide emergency. After the first pneumonia cases due to the SARS-CoV-2 virus were diagnosed at the end of December 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan [25], the disease spread in many countries at various speeds and with different effects. As of 20 April 2020, the USA was the most affected country in the world in terms of absolute number of contagions, followed by some European countries, such as Spain, Italy and France, which occupied the top three positions. Considering the different populations of these areas, Italy maintains the World ominous world record for the highest in case fatality rate (13.3%), defined as the proportion of deaths from the disease compared to the total number of people diagnosed with that disease over a certain period of time. Although these numbers are still uncertain due to under-reported infections and will be liable to adjustment [16], since the first infection was detected on 20 February 2020 in the province of Lodi (Lombardy region, northern Italy), the epidemic appeared to be very aggressive in this country. Within a few days, the disease spread throughout all Italian provinces, exhibiting nonlinear dy
Data Loading...
