World governments should protect their population from COVID-19 pandemic using Italy and Lombardy as precursor

Mariano Supino; Alberto d'Onofrio; Federico Luongo; Giovanni Occhipinti; Alma Dal Co

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.25.20042713 doi: medRxiv preprint While NHS are prepared to receive a certain number of ICU patients distributed during the influenza season, which lasts several months, no NHS can manage an exponentially growing number of COVID-19 patients. To avoid the saturation of the ICUs, governments need to impose strong containment measures, such as lockdown of the population. Acting early is paramount: after containments measures are taken, the number of cases still grows exponentially for at least ten days, due to infections contracted before the measures (2). The later these containment measures are taken, the stronger these measures need to be to contain diffusion of COVID-19, and could be anyways insufficient to avoid the catastrophic collapse of the NHS. For example, Japan and Singapore were able to avoid a lockdown of the population, because the governments implemented a range of measures at a very early stage of the outbreak (Fig. 1 ).