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

From the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak (February 24 th 2020), Italy is providing statistics of the epidemic, through a daily bulletin and an open-access repository (10). This repository contains daily counts of confirmed cases, hospitalized patients, ICU patients, and deceased patients, at the national and regional level (Fig. 3 ). This repository represents an important and unique source of information for other countries that the pandemic will reach. The number of ICU patients represents a more robust information compared to the number of infected people, which is subject to an under-reporting. The number of infected people strongly depends on the number of performed tests and on the strategy of sampling of the population (e.g. only symptomatic people, random people). Testing capability and strategy might largely vary among different countries, while ICU patients count is a routine operation performed by all NHSs. ICU counts are more reliable also compared to deaths counts, since most patients dying with COVID-19 have comorbidities and ascertaining that COVID-19 was the primary cause of death can be complicated. For example, Germany reported no cases of death due to SARS-CoV-2 until there were All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.