Efficiency of Covid-19 Containment by Measuring Time Dependent Doubling Time

Bianconi, Antonio; Marcelli, Augusto; Campi, Gaetano; Perali, Andrea

While containment policies of the Covid-19 epidemic have been applied in different countries, a comparative quantitative measure of the efficiency of these policies is not available. We show here that the time evolution of the pandemic doubling time Td(t) is a reliable measure of the efficiency of the Lockdown, case Finding, mobile Tracing (LFT) policy using modern technologies versus the traditional Lockdown Stop and Go (LSG) policy. This goal has been achieved to verify by extracting the time evolution of the doubling time Td(t). The results provide a quantitative measure and make possible predictions on the time evolution of epidemic for different containment policy. Where the lowest s factor, the characteristic time of the exponential growing Td(t) in the arrested regime, was reached by LFT policy also the lowest number of deaths and the shorter time width of the epidemic dome was reached. The record for the largest number of deaths is correlated with the largest s factor in the near threshold regime where no containment measures were taken in time. LFT policy has been able to reduce both the intensity and time width of the Covid-19 pandemic dome achieving both a low number of deaths and low economic losses