Intensive Care Unit Resource Planning During COVID-19 Emergency at the Regional Level: the Italian case.

Pietro Hiram Guzzi; Giuseppe Tradigo; Pierangelo Veltri

home quarantine for low symptoms, (ii) hospitalisation for part of them and, 23 (iii) hospitalisation in ICUs requiring respiratory support for severe ones. 24 From a clinical point of view, patients affected by COVID-19 usually 25 present symptoms similar to common flu, e.g. fever, dry cough, sickness, and 26 breathing problems. A fraction of patients do not need hospitalisation, and 27 the symptoms disappear in a short time (around 1-2 weeks). In some cases, 28 COVID-19 causes severe pneumonia, which requires respiratory support and 29 can lead to death, especially in the presence of co-morbidities such as diabetes 30 or hypertension [3] . Patients with severe pneumonia need to be treated in 31 ICUs with the use of mechanical ventilators [1] . 32 We focus on disease diffusion modelling at a regional scale in Italy and 33 3 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.