It takes two weeks to understand how the Covid-19 epidemic will evolve in Italy, that is, if it will tend to go down or if it will stop on a plateau: physicists Enzo Marinari, of the Sapienza University of Rome, and Daniele Pedrini, of the '' National Institute of Nuclear Physics (Infn) and coordinator of the CovidStat site.
"The maximum number of infected people has been reached, it is clear that even admissions to intensive care units have exceeded the peak - observes Marinari - and for deaths we are waiting for the peak to be reached shortly. We do not know, however, if there will be a stationary phase, with the reaching of a plateau, or if we go towards a phase of steep descent ".
Right now, he continues, "I would not expect a global recovery, but we have to wait a bit to rule out any fluctuations in the data. It will take about two weeks to understand how this new phase of the epidemic will evolve."
Also according to Pedrini "there is a marked improvement in the trend that was observed up to 8-9 days ago, both in terms of the decline in infections and in the evolution of the curve". The positive signs, he continues, concern "the doubling time of cases from 6 days at the beginning of January to 34 days"; admissions to intensive care "are no longer increasing and now we expect a decline, perhaps slow considering the high number of positive cases in recent days"; the Rt contagion index also fell from 1.83 in January to 1.14 and "is rapidly approaching 1".
Overall, for the physicist, "the signs of the descent are more robust and are the symptom that we have reached the peak, but it is still early to draw conclusions: we will have to wait two weeks to be sure that we are in the descent phase of the curve".
