Covid-19 Outbreak Progression in Italian Regions: Approaching the Peak by March 29th

COSIMO DISTANTE; PRISCO PISCITELLI; ALESSANDRO MIANI

Background: Italy and especially the Lombardy region is experiencing a heavy burden of Covid-19 infection. The peak of the epidemics has not yet been reached and it is expected to be delayed in Central and Southern Italian regions compared to Northern ones. We have modeled the Covid-19 outbreak progression in Italian Regions vs. Lombardy. Methods. In our models, we have estimated the basic reproduction number (R 0 ) -which represents the average number of people that can be infected by a person who has already acquired the infection -both by fitting the exponential growth rate of the infection across a 1-month period and also by using day by day assessment, based on single observations. We used the susceptible-exposed-infected-removed (SEIR) compartment model to predict the spreading of the pandemic in Italy. author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. h a s n o t y e t b e e n r e a c h e d . U n t i l n o w , S o u t h e r n R e g i o n s s e e m t o b e l e s s a f f e c t e d b y t h e C o v i d -1 9 i n f e c t i o n a l t h o u g h a h u g e n u m b e r o f p e o p l e -m a i n l y s t u d e n t s a t t e n d i n g U n i v e r s i t i e s i n N o r t h e r n I t a l y c a m e b a c k f r o m P o V a l l e y t o t h e i r f a m i l i e s i n t h e S o u t h j u s t i n t h e m i d d l e o f t h e o u t b r e At the date of this study (March 23 rd 2020), the epidemic growth was still near exponential growth, a the fitted model has many inliers data points. The method is based on non-linear least square framewo for intrinsic growth estimation , in order to obtain with M the Laplace transforming probability distribution of the serial interval of the infection. The estimation is obtained with 100 susceptibility for 2019-nCoV at the early stage in Wuhan as reported in [7] . In Figure 2 author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.