The Covid-19 pandemic in Italy Franco Peracchi∗ Georgetown University, EIEF, and University of Rome Tor Vergata This version: March 29, 2020
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Introduction
In this note I use the data from the website of Dipartimento della Protezione Civile (DPC), which at the moment represent the main source of quantitative information on the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy and are described in some more detail in Section 2. These data are updated daily, so I will also update my note daily and post it shortly after the DPC data have been released. What I try to do here is just to describe and summarize some basic aspects of the pandemic in Italy with no attempt at structural modeling. Neverheless, I hope that the stylized facts presented in Section 3 will help in sorting out possible interpretations of the process that is still unfolding. However, in Section 4, I will venture into a simple forecasting exercise based on the extrapolation of the observed trends.
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Data
The DPC website contains several daily time-series at the national, regional and provincial level. I focus on the following five series: the number of currently positive cases (“totale attualmente positivi”), the number of new positive cases (“nuovi attualmente positivi”), the number of discharged (“dimessi guariti”), the number of deaths (“deceduti”), and total number of confirmed cases (“totale casi”). Notice that the number of currently positive cases is not equal to the number of currently infected members of the population, but only to the number of those who have been tested positive. The number of currently infected people is likely to be an order of magnitude larger (see e.g. Li et al. 2020). Further notice that the ratio of the currently positive to the currently infected cannot be taken as approximately constant, as the criteria and the intensity of the testing process vary over time and across regions. The new positive cases is the daily variation in the number of currently positive cases, while the total number of confirmed cases is the sum of the number of currently positive cases, deaths ∗
E-mail address: fp211@georgetown.edu. I thank Luca Anderlini, Giuseppe De Luca, Raffaela Giordano, Luigi Guiso, Caterina Peracchi, Marta Peracchi, and Daniele Terlizzese for comments and helpful discussions.
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