Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2020 Jul 10:725:138539.
doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.138539. Epub 2020 Apr 6.

Evaluation of the lockdowns for the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Italy and Spain after one month follow up

Affiliations

Evaluation of the lockdowns for the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Italy and Spain after one month follow up

Aurelio Tobías. Sci Total Environ. .

Abstract

From the end of February, the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Spain has been following the footsteps of that in Italy very closely. We have analyzed the trends of incident cases, deaths, and intensive care unit admissions (ICU) in both countries before and after their respective national lockdowns using an interrupted time-series design. Data was analyzed with quasi-Poisson regression using an interaction model to estimate the change in trends. After the first lockdown, incidence trends were considerably reduced in both countries. However, although the slopes have been flattened for all outcomes, the trends kept rising. During the second lockdown, implementing more restrictive measures for mobility, it has been a change in the trend slopes for both countries in daily incident cases and ICUs. This improvement indicates that the efforts overtaken are being successful in flattening the epidemic curve, and reinforcing the belief that we must hold on.

Keywords: Intensive care unit admissions; Interrupted time-series; Lockdown; Mortality; SARS-CoV-2.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Unlabelled Image
Graphical abstract
Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Trends and daily observed incident diagnosed cases, deaths and ICU admissions in Italy and Spain, between February 24th to April 5th.

References

    1. Bernal J.L., Cummins S., Gasparrini A. Interrupted time series regression for the evaluation of public health interventions: a tutorial. Int. J. Epidemiol. 2017;46:348–355. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Dipartamento della Protezione Civille 2020. COVID-19 Italia – Monitoraggio della situazione – (Accessed April 5th, 2020). Available from: http://opendatadpc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/b0c68bc....
    1. Instituto de Salud Carlos III 2020. Situación de COVID-19 en España. (Accessed April 5th, 2020). Available from: https://covid19.isciii.es/.
    1. Mitjà O., Arenas À., Rodó X., Tobias A., Brew J., Benlloch J.M. Experts' request to the Spanish government: move Spain towards complete lockdown. Lancet. 2020 doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30753-4. (pii: S0140-6736(20)30753-4) - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Our World in Data 2020. Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) – Statistics and Research. Oxford Martin School, The University of Oxford, Global Change Data Lab. [Accessed April 5th, 2020]. Available from: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/.

LinkOut - more resources