The europe second wave of COVID-19 infection and the Italy "strange" situation

Abstract

At the end of February 2020 COVID-19 infection appeared in Italy, with consequent diffusion, in few weeks, in almost all the Europe. Despite that human-to-human is the recognized main virus transmission way, several authors supposed pollution-to-human mechanisms to justify the appearance of contagious in Italy. However, these works often suffered of a lack of analysis of possible overlapping of different variables, other than only environmental ones. After a decreasing of detected cases in summer, Europe faced with the appearance of a COVID-19 second wave. In this context the Italy situation appeared to be "strange". Indeed, compared with the other selected Countries (France, Germany, UK, and Spain), the Italian infection cases resulted to be lower, in the same analysed period. This work is devoted to find a possible justification of the unexpected situation found in Italy. A comparison of the imposed restrictions in the considered Countries allows to highlight that some policies result more effective to limit the virus spread. This clearly shows that the imposed constraints and the people capacities to receipt them are fundamental parameters that must be always accounted in the determination of the virus expansion. The lesson provided by Italy should be achieved by other member states where the COVID-19 sanitary crisis results to be worse. It is evident that the re-opening of ordinary activities involving people interactions, in Autumn, may contribute to promote a larger SARS-CoV-2 diffusion also in Italy. Author strongly highlights that pollution-to-human transmission mechanisms cannot be proposed whiteout considering the complexity of human-to-human interactions, that can be modified by imposed restrictions. It is fundamental to understand that a more precise acknowledge of the variables that should be considered in model predictions, instead of a need of more precise point prediction, will contribute to increase the reliability and the comprehension of the virus diffusion mechanisms, that is fundamental to face this pandemic period.

Keywords: Air pollution; COVID-19; Facemask; Human-to-human interactions; Italy; Restriction measures; SARS-CoV-2; Second wave; Urban resilience.

Fig. 1

Detected COVID-19 infection cases in France, UK, Italy, Spain, and Germany, till to September 27, 2020. Data were downloaded from European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control webpage (https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en). The scale is logarithmic.

Fig. 2

The Government Response index for EU on June 30, 2020, with the legend. It can be included among 0 and 100. A value of 100 represents the strictest response level. Data are available on the Our World in Data website, by Creative Commons contribution (https://ourworldindata.org).

Fig. 3

Data about the survey of people wearing the facemask in public spaces (%). These data were downloaded by the YouGov website (https://yougov.co.uk/). The date when the facemask measure was mandatory, for the considered EU Countries, is also reported (in accord with data reported in Table 1) and displayed as a vertical line.