First month of the epidemic caused by COVID-19 in Italy: current status and real-time outbreak development forecast

Rosario Megna

The outbreak of the novel Coronavirus called COVID-19 (or SARS-CoV-2), which originated at the end of December 2019 in the city of Wuhan, in the Hubei Province, China [1] , is having a dramatic global evolution, and was recently classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020 [2] . The disease, which can be diagnosed through the use of a nasopharyngeal swab, under the most severe forms can lead to bilateral pneumonia [3] which can be lethal especially in elderly patients with comorbidities [4] . The first outbreaks of COVID-19 in Italy occurred during the second half of February 2020 in some areas in the North of the country. Despite the drastic restrictions imposed by the Italian Government in those areas (DL n. 6, 23 February 2020) [5] , several other outbreaks began in other areas of northern Italy, forcing the Authorities to extend the previously adopted restrictions to the entire national territory (DPCM of 3 March 2020 et seq.) [5] . Due to the high contagiousness of the infection, further spread by asymptomatic people [4] , in a few weeks Italy has become the country with the greatest number of infected people after China [6] . The large number of severe cases among infected people in Italy led to the hospitalization of thousands of patients [7, 8] , with a heavy burden on the National Health Service. In particular, the most affected Regions are Lombardy and Emilia Romagna, with more than half of the total cases. One month after the beginning of the epidemic in Italy we report the situation and propose a forecast model in real-time to estimate its evolution.