PMC:7547104 / 1427-4963
Annnotations
{"target":"https://pubannotation.org/docs/sourcedb/PMC/sourceid/7547104","sourcedb":"PMC","sourceid":"7547104","source_url":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/7547104","text":"Introduction\nRegionalism is an integral part of the Italian constitution. Each of Italy’s twenty administrative regions is independent on Health and oversees its own share of the Italian National Health service. The regional presidents and their councils can independently take their own actions, strengthening or, at times, weakening national containment rules. Previous studies have modelled the spread of the epidemics and its evolution in the country at the national level1–5, and some have looked at the effects of different types of containment and mitigation strategies6–11. Limited work12–21 has taken into account the spatial dynamics of the epidemic but, to the best of our knowledge, no previous paper in the literature has explicitly taken into consideration the pseudo-federalist nature of the Italian Republic and its strong regional heterogeneity when it comes to health matters, hospital capacity, economic costs of a lockdown and the presence of inter-regional people’s flows.\nIn this study, we investigate the whole of the country as a network of regions, each modelled with different parameters. The goal is to identify if and when measures taken by the Italian government had an effect at both the national, but most importantly, at the regional level. Also, we want to uncover the effects on the epidemic spread of regional heterogeneity and inter-regional flows of people and use control theoretic tools to propose and assess differentiated interventions at the regional level to reopen the country and avoid future recurrent epidemic outbreaks.\nAs aggregate models of the COVID-19 epidemic cannot capture these effects, to carry out our study we derived and parameterized from real data a network model of the epidemic in the country (see Fig. 1a), where each of the 20 regions is a node and the links model both proximity flows and long-distance transportation routes (ferries, trains and planes). The model is first shown to possess the right level of granularity and complexity to capture the crucial elements needed to correctly predict and reproduce the available data. Then, it is used to design and test differentiated feedback interventions at the regional level to alleviate the epidemic impact.\nFig. 1 Schematic diagram of the network-model structure and representative regional parameters.\na Representative graph of the network-model structure used in the paper. Only a subset of all links is shown for the sake of clarity (the complete graphs are depicted in Supplementary Fig. 8). Solid lines represent proximity links, dashed lines long-distance transportation routes (planes and trains), dotted lines show major ferry routes between insular regions and the Italian mainland. b Table of the Italian region names and their labels in the graph.\nUsing the model and an ad hoc algorithm to parameterize it from real data, we evaluate the effectiveness of the national lockdown strategy implemented by the Italian government providing evidence of its efficacy across regions. Also, we show that inter-regional fluxes must be carefully controlled as they can have dramatic effects on recurrent epidemic waves. Finally, we convincingly show that regional feedback interventions, where each of the twenty regions strengthens or weakens local mitigating actions (social distancing, inflow/outflow control) as a function of the saturation of their hospital capacity, can be beneficial in mitigating possible outbreaks and in avoiding recurrent epidemic waves while reducing the costs of a nationwide 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