Forecasting the impact of the containment measures for COVID-19 in France, Italy, and Spain (original) (raw)

Background: The Coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) is now a major challenge for healthcare systems in many countries, including some of the G20 countries like China, Italy and France. The purpose of this paper was to estimate how this disease could impact Italy, Spain and France, in comparison to China, based on the timing of their first response to the epidemic.Methods: The study visually estimated when will the suppression strategies implemented in Italy, Spain and France would change the direction of the daily new infections curve. The study utilizes the publicly available data from the WHO website. The curve representing the response strategy from China was used as a visual reference in this case, assuming that the virus is impacting all populations in the same way, transmitted in similar rate, and the time needed from the implementation of the suppression strategies to the appearance of its impact would be identical in all countries. Then, the total number of cases and deat...