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The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is .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 temporally to superpose one on another, so that for all countries day zero represents the onset of COVID-19 outbreak. Japan and Singapore were able to contain the outbreak at a the very early stage. The Chinese region of Hubei was able to contain diffusion at a later stage, by imposing a lockdown of the population on January 30 th 2020 (red triangle), and a full lockdown of the population on February 13 th 2020 (red diamond), closing all non-essential companies and manufacturing plants. Italy, Spain, France, UK, and the American States of California and New York (referred as US*) display exponential growth of confirmed cases. Italy, Spain, France and US* imposed a lockdown at similar (relative) times, indicated by the green, gold, blue and purple triangle, respectively. The four countries have comparable population sizes to Hubei region, with a minimum of Spain (46.7M people) and a maximum of France (66.9M).