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

Here we show that it is possible to predict the date of saturation of the ICUs in a region early on, by using the temporal information about the number of available ICU beds. We focus on Lombardy region. The number of ICU patients in the region grew exponentially for the first ten days, starting from February 24 th , and then slowed down as it reached the number of available ICU beds. We can predict the date at which the ICU beds became saturated by performing a linear regression of the logarithm of the number of ICU patients, starting from the first four datapoints (Fig. 4) . This result shows that monitoring the ICUs statistics at the beginning of the epidemic allows countries to assess the date of possible saturation of the ICU beds early on. Monitoring the ICUs early in the outbreak is paramount: Lombardy in Italy has one the best NHS in the World (6,7), therefore most countries will face the saturation of their ICU beds at earlier stages of the outbreak. It is worth to note that several factors can affect the time to saturate the ICU beds. In particular, the saturation time depends on the connectivity of the population: the more people are connected within a region, the faster the infection diffuses (8) . Therefore, the risk of ICUs saturation is higher for the most developed and connected regions, and Lombardy is the most connected region of Italy. Moreover, if a lock down measure is imposed, the saturation time depends on the incubation time of the disease and on the degree of adherence of the population to the lockdown.