A network model of Italy shows that intermittent regional strategies can alleviate the COVID-19 epidemic
Autor
Della Rossa, Fabio
Salzano, Davide
Di Meglio, Anna
De Lellis, Francesco
Coraggio, Marco
Calabrese, Carmela
Guarino, Agostino
Cardona-Rivera, Ricardo
De Lellis, Pietro
Liuzza, Davide
Lo Iudice, Francesco
Russo, Giovanni
Bernardo, Mario di
Institución
Resumen
The COVID-19 epidemic hit Italy particularly hard, yielding the implementation of strict
national lockdown rules. Previous modelling studies at the national level overlooked the fact
that Italy is divided into administrative regions which can independently oversee their own
share of the Italian National Health Service. Here, we show that heterogeneity between
regions is essential to understand the spread of the epidemic and to design effective strategies to control the disease. We model Italy as a network of regions and parameterize the
model of each region on real data spanning over two months from the initial outbreak. We
confirm the effectiveness at the regional level of the national lockdown strategy and propose
coordinated regional interventions to prevent future national lockdowns, while avoiding
saturation of the regional health systems and mitigating impact on costs. Our study and
methodology can be easily extended to other levels of granularity to support policy- and
decision-makers.