In Italy, the COVID-19 epidemic curve started to flatten when the health system had already exceeded its capacity, raising concerns that the lockdown was indeed delayed. The aim of this study was to evaluate the health effects of late implementation of the lockdown in Italy. Using national data on the daily number of COVID-19 cases, we first estimated the effect of the lockdown, employing an interrupted time series analysis. Second, we evaluated the effect of an early lockdown on the trend of new cases, creating a counterfactual scenario where the intervention was implemented one week in advance. We then predicted the corresponding number of intensive care unit (ICU) admissions, non-ICU admissions, and deaths. Finally, we compared results under the actual and counterfactual scenarios. An early implementation of the lockdown would have avoided about 126,000 COVID-19 cases, 54,700 non-ICU admissions, 15,600 ICU admissions, and 12,800 deaths, corresponding to 60% (95%CI: 55% to 64%), 52% (95%CI: 46% to 57%), 48% (95%CI: 42% to 53%), and 44% (95%CI: 38% to 50%) reduction, respectively. We found that the late implementation of the lockdown in Italy was responsible for a substantial proportion of hospital admissions and deaths associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

中文翻译：

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由于在意大利实施了封锁措施，COVID-19的死亡和住院人数过多。

在意大利，当卫生系统已经超出其能力时，COVID-19流行曲线开始趋于平缓，引起人们对封锁确实延迟的担忧。这项研究的目的是评估在意大利延迟实施锁定措施对健康的影响。利用有关COVID-19每日日数的国家数据，我们首先采用了中断的时间序列分析来估算锁定的效果。其次，我们评估了早期锁定对新病例趋势的影响，创建了一个反事实情境，在该情境下提前一周进行干预。然后，我们预测了重症监护病房（ICU）入院，非ICU入院和死亡的相应数量。最后，我们比较了实际情况和反事实情况下的结果。尽早实施锁定将避免约126,000例COVID-19病例，54,700例非ICU入院，15,600例ICU入院和12,800例死亡，分别相当于60％（95％CI：55％至64％），52％（95 ％CI：46％至57％），48％（95％CI：42％至53％）和44％（95％CI：38％至50％）降低。我们发现，在意大利实施锁定措施的时间较晚，导致与COVID-19大流行相关的住院和死亡人数占了很大比例。