The effects of containment measures in the Italian outbreak of COVID-19
- PDF / 1,806,775 Bytes
- 8 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 46 Downloads / 155 Views
CORRESPONDENCE
Open Access
The effects of containment measures in the Italian outbreak of COVID-19 M. Supino1* , A. d’Onofrio2,3, F. Luongo4, G. Occhipinti1,5 and A. Dal Co6
Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic is spreading worldwide. Italy emerged early on as the country with the largest outbreak outside Asia. The outbreak in Northern Italy demonstrates that it is fundamental to contain the virus’ spread at a very early stage of diffusion. At later stages, no containment measure, even if strict, can prevent the saturation of the hospitals and of the intensive care units in any country. Here we show that it is possible to predict when the intensive care units will saturate, within a few days from the beginning of the exponential growth of COVID-19 intensive care patients. Using early counts of intensive care patients, we predict the saturation for Lombardy, Italy. We also assess short-term and long-term lockdown effects on intensive care units and number of deaths. Governments should use the Italian outbreak as a precedent and implement appropriate containment measures to prevent the saturation of their intensive care units and protect their population, also, and above all, in anticipation of a possible second exponential spread of infections.
Background The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a respiratory infectious disease caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2 (also known as 2019-nCoV), which originated in Wuhan, China, probably in early December 2019. On January 23rd, Wuhan city shut down public transportation and airways; 1 week later, Wuhan and other cities in the province of Hubei, imposed strict social distancing measures (closure of school and non-essential work activities), combined with active search and isolation of infective cases and their contacts; on February 13th, all non-essential companies and manufacturing plants were closed. On February 15th, France reported the first death from COVID-19 outside Asia, while dozens of countries document cases of infection. On February 24th, 3 weeks after the lockdown of Wuhan and other cities, cases in China have fallen from an average of 2500 daily to 400 cases. In the meanwhile, Italy emerged as the country with the largest outbreak outside Asia. On March 9th, * Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Université de Paris, Institut de physique du globe de Paris, CNRS, F-75005 Paris, France Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
Italy imposed a lockdown of the whole nation. On March 11th, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the pandemic state, when the world counted more than 118,000 cases in 114 countries. On March 19th, while China announced that the incidence was brought to negligible levels and attempts to prudently restart normal life were initiated, the total number of deaths outside China overtook the deaths counted in China. On March 19th, Italy counted 3405 deaths, surpassing China. In Europe, several countries experienced similar exponential growth of cases as Italy, with just a few days of delay (Fig. 1). Spain and France
Data Loading...
