Mitigation Policies and Emergency Care Management in Europe's Ground Zero for COVID-19

  1. Gabriele Ciminelli
  2. Sílvia Garcia-Mandicó

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Abstract

This paper draws from daily death registry data on 4,000 Italian municipalities to investigate two crucial policies that can dramatically affect the toll of COVID-19: the shutdown of non-essential businesses and the management of the emergency care system. Our results, which are robust to controlling for a host of co-factors, offer strong evidence that the closure of service activities is very effective in reducing COVID-19 mortality - this was about 15% lower in municipalities with a 10 percentage points higher employment share in shut down services. Shutting down factories, instead, is much less effective, plausibly because factory workers engage in more limited physical interactions relative to those in the consumer-facing service sector. Concerning the management of the health care system, we find that mortality strongly increases with distance from the intensive care unit (ICU). Municipalities at 10 km from the closest ICU experienced up to 50% higher mortality. This effect - which is largest within the epicenter and in days of abnormally high volumes of calls to the emergency line - underscores the importance of improving pre-hospital emergency services and building ambulance capacity to ensure timely transportation of critical patients to the ICU.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.19.20106575: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    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.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

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

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

    About SciScore

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.05.19.20106575v1 on medRxiv