ITALY LOCKDOWN END DATE FULL
ITALY LOCKDOWN END DATE SERIES

During the first wave, it opted for a full national lockdown where only essential economic activities were permitted.

The central government responded to the spread of the virus in two different ways. In 2020 Italy experienced two waves of pandemic with peaks in April and November. In section 6 we provide policy recommendations.Ģ. Italian management of the pandemic emergency Section 4 sets out the results, which are discussed in section 5. Section 3 deals with data and empirical model. In the next section, we describe the Italian management of the pandemic emergency during the first and the second wave. We argue that these policies should take rapid account of the virus's evolution of and the compliance of citizens with health norms. Regarding the introduction of the regional restrictions implemented to mitigate the second wave, we find that restrictive-zone policies were not always efficient in containing the virus in Umbria. We do not find any effect of the other three relaxation policies on the spread of the virus, highlighting that the exit plan was overall successful in both regions.

Our econometric analysis shows that only the first relaxation policy had an immediate impact on the number of contagions, suggesting that it was prematurely implemented. The heterogeneous spread of the virus across regions in most countries worldwide, and especially in Italy, calls for more thorough investigation of anti-COVID-19 policies at the sub-national level in order to gain better understanding of the territorial factors that may boost the containing and lifesaving effects of such policies. Moreover, we propose a timely assessment of the effectiveness in the Umbria region of the regional policies implemented by the Italian government to contain the dramatic second wave of the virus.Īnother contribution that we make to the literature is the analysis of the national policies at the lowest Italian level of government (municipality) on an unexplored dataset, to the best of our knowledge.

ITALY LOCKDOWN END DATE SERIES

Moreover, the Italian government, during the second wave of infections (November-February 2021), implemented differentiated restrictive measures by classifying regions according to their risk of infections.īy employing an interrupted time series (ITS) method, ,, we investigate the effect of four gradual relaxation policies implemented after the lockdown, analyzing as case studies the regions of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia (henceforth FVG) and Umbria. Italy was also the first European country to implement relaxation policies that represented an exit plan from the lockdown. Understanding the effects of the Italian policies is crucial, because the Italian government was the first one in Europe to face the pandemic with scant information regarding the virus or even the effects of quarantine measures. In this work, we analyze the effects on the virus spread of anti-COVID-19 policies implemented by the Italian government at the local level during the first and second wave of the pandemic. Although vaccine approvals at the end of the 2020 raised hopes of a turnaround in the pandemic, most countries have still not managed to accelerate the pace of inoculation because of supply shortages, vaccine skepticism, bureaucracy and logistical obstacles. Lockdown brings a country's economy to its knees because it leads to business closures, skyrocketing unemployment, plummeting financial markets, decreasing investments, and slashed consumption, thus generating huge economic fallout.Īfter a decrease of cases during the summer of 2020, the world began to understand that the battle against COVID-19 was going to be hard, when a devastating second wave of infection begin to hit most countries in October 2020, as the virus evolved into new, more contagious variants.

These policies come with tremendous economic and social costs for society worldwide. Under the threat of an unknown virus that endangers the lives of citizens, restrictive measures that limit the transmissibility, such as lockdown, are seen as the only means to curb death tolls and prevent healthcare disasters. After more than a year since the beginning of the health emergency, the virus continues to be a threat for most countries worldwide as more contagious variants cause new, more intense waves of infection, and as death tolls rise. In December 2019 the world first encountered the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by a new virus classified as ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2′ (SARS-CoV-2).

Italy lockdown end date