Contained in:
Book Chapter

Measuring the effectiveness of COVID-19 containment policies in Italian regions: are we doing enough?

  • Demetrio Panarello
  • Giorgio Tassinari

A successful fight against COVID-19 greatly depends on citizens’ adherence to the restrictive measures, which may not suffice alone. Making use of a containment index, data on sanctions, and Google’s movement trends across Italian regions, complemented by other sources, we investigate the extent to which compliance with the mobility limitations has affected the number of deaths over time in the period from the 24th of February 2020 to the 9th of November 2020, by using panel data for Italian regions, analysed through a negative binomial regression method. We also differentiated the study period, estimating two distinct models on two subsamples: until the 13th of September and since the 14th of September. In so doing, we show how the pandemic dynamics have changed between the first and the second wave of the emergency. Our results highlight that the importance of the restrictive measures and of citizens’ accord on their abidance has greatly increased since the end of the summer, also because the stringency level of the adopted measures has critically declined. Informing citizens about the effects and purposes of the restrictive measures is of paramount importance, especially in the current phase of the pandemic.

  • Keywords:
  • Compliance rate,
  • Schools reopening,
  • Second wave of COVID-19,
  • Google Community Mobility Reports,
  • Stringency index,
+ Show More

Demetrio Panarello

University of Bologna, Italy - ORCID: 0000-0003-1667-1936

Giorgio Tassinari

University of Bologna, Italy - ORCID: 0000-0002-5161-7989

  1. Buonomo, B., Della Marca, R. (2020). Effects of information-induced behavioural changes during the COVID-19 lockdowns: the case of Italy. Royal Society Open Science, 7(10): 201635.
  2. Chan, S., Chu, J., Zhang, Y., Nadarajah, S. (2021). Count regression models for COVID-19. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 563: 125460.
  3. Chang, S.L., Harding, N., Zachreson, C., Cliff, O.M., Prokopenko, M. (2020). Modelling transmission and control of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia. Nature Communications, 11(1), pp. 1-13.
  4. Dipartimento della Protezione Civile (2020). COVID-19 Italia - Monitoraggio situazione. Available at: https://github.com/pcm-dpc/COVID-19.
  5. Google LLC (2020). Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports. Available at: https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility.
  6. Gruppo della Sorveglianza COVID-19 (2020). Caratteristiche dei pazienti deceduti positivi all'infezione da SARS-CoV-2 in Italia: Dati al 2 dicembre 2020. Available at: https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-COVID-2019_2_dicembre.pdf.
  7. Hale, T., Boby, T., Angrist, N., Cameron-Blake, E., Hallas, L., Kira, B., Majumdar, S., Petherick, A., Phillips, T., Tatlow, H., Webster, S. (2020). Variation in Government Responses to COVID-19. Blavatnik School of Government, Working Paper, Version 9.0. Available at: https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/publications/variation-government-responses-covid-19.
  8. Linton, N.M., Kobayashi, T., Yang, Y., Hayashi, K., Akhmetzhanov, A.R., Jung, S.M., ..., Nishiura, H. (2020). Incubation period and other epidemiological characteristics of 2019 novel coronavirus infections with right truncation: a statistical analysis of publicly available case data. Journal of Clinical Medicine, 9(2): 538.
  9. Ministero dell’Interno (2020). Coronavirus, i dati dei servizi di controllo. Available at: https://www.interno.gov.it/it/coronavirus-i-dati-dei-servizi-controllo.
  10. Reinders Folmer, C., Kuiper, M.E., Olthuis, E., Kooistra, E.B., de Bruijn, A.L., Brownlee, M., ..., van Rooij, B. (2020). Maintaining Compliance When the Virus Returns: Understanding Adherence to Social Distancing Measures in the Netherlands in July 2020. Amsterdam Law School Research Paper No. 2020-53. Available at SSRN. DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3682546
  11. Rinaldi, G., Paradisi, M. (2020). An empirical estimate of the infection fatality rate of COVID-19 from the first Italian outbreak. medRxiv. DOI: 10.1101/2020.04.18.20070912
  12. Romagnani, P., Gnone, G., Guzzi, F., Negrini, S., Guastalla, A., Annunziato, F., ..., De Palma, R. (2020). The COVID-19 infection: lessons from the Italian experience. Journal of Public Health Policy, 41, pp. 238-244.
  13. Sebastiani, G., Palù, G. (2020). COVID-19 and School Activities in Italy. Viruses, 12(11): 1339.
  14. Sobol, M., Blachnio, A., Przepiórka, A. (2020). Time of pandemic: Temporal perspectives related to compliance with public health regulations concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. Social Science & Medicine, 265: 113408.
  15. Verma, B.K., Verma, M., Verma, V.K., Abdullah, R.B., Nath, D.C., Khan, H.T., ..., Verma, V. (2020). Global lockdown: An effective safeguard in responding to the threat of COVID‐19. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 26(6), pp. 1592-1598.
  16. Vollmer, M.A., Mishra, S., Unwin, H.J.T., Gandy, A., Mellan, T.A., Bradley, V., ..., Bhatt, S. (2020). Report 20: Using mobility to estimate the transmission intensity of COVID-19 in Italy: a subnational analysis with future scenarios. medRxiv. DOI: 10.1101/2020.05.05.20089359
PDF
  • Publication Year: 2021
  • Pages: 75-80
  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
  • © 2021 Author(s)

XML
  • Publication Year: 2021
  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
  • © 2021 Author(s)

Chapter Information

Chapter Title

Measuring the effectiveness of COVID-19 containment policies in Italian regions: are we doing enough?

Authors

Demetrio Panarello, Giorgio Tassinari

Language

English

DOI

10.36253/978-88-5518-461-8.15

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2021

Copyright Information

© 2021 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

ASA 2021 Statistics and Information Systems for Policy Evaluation

Book Subtitle

BOOK OF SHORT PAPERS of the on-site conference

Editors

Bruno Bertaccini, Luigi Fabbris, Alessandra Petrucci

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2021

Copyright Information

© 2021 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/978-88-5518-461-8

eISBN (pdf)

978-88-5518-461-8

eISBN (xml)

978-88-5518-462-5

Series Title

Proceedings e report

Series ISSN

2704-601X

Series E-ISSN

2704-5846

102

Fulltext
downloads

173

Views

Export Citation

1,297

Open Access Books

in the Catalogue

1,746

Book Chapters

3,070,547

Fulltext
downloads

3,973

Authors

from 817 Research Institutions

of 63 Nations

61

scientific boards

from 334 Research Institutions

of 42 Nations

1,139

Referees

from 343 Research Institutions

of 36 Nations