The geography of COVID-19 spread in Italy and implications for the relaxation of confinement measures

  1. Enrico Bertuzzo
  2. Lorenzo Mari
  3. Damiano Pasetto
  4. Stefano Miccoli
  5. Renato Casagrandi
  6. Marino Gatto
  7. Andrea Rinaldo

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Abstract

The pressing need to restart socioeconomic activities locked-down to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Italy must be coupled with effective methodologies to selectively relax containment measures. Here we employ a spatially explicit model, properly attentive to the role of inapparent infections, capable of: estimating the expected unfolding of the outbreak under continuous lockdown (baseline trajectory); assessing deviations from the baseline, should lockdown relaxations result in increased disease transmission; calculating the isolation effort required to prevent a resurgence of the outbreak. A 40% increase in effective transmission would yield a rebound of infections. A control effort capable of isolating daily  ~5.5% of the exposed and highly infectious individuals proves necessary to maintain the epidemic curve onto the decreasing baseline trajectory. We finally provide an ex-post assessment based on the epidemiological data that became available after the initial analysis and estimate the actual disease transmission that occurred after weakening the lockdown.

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  1. Version published to 10.1038/s41467-020-18050-2
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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.30.20083568: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

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    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

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    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
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    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.04.30.20083568v2 on medRxiv
  4. Version published to 10.1101/2020.04.30.20083568v1 on medRxiv