Integro-differential approach for modeling the COVID-19 dynamics - Impact of confinement measures in Italy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has overwhelmed the life and security of most of the world countries, and especially of the Western countries, without similar experiences in the recent past. In a first phase, the response of health systems and governments was disorganized, but then incisive, also driven by the fear of a new and dramatic phenomenon. In the second phase, several governments, including Italy, accepted the doctrine of "coexistence with the virus" by putting into practice a series of containment measures aimed at limiting the dramatic sanitary consequences while not jeopardizing the economic and social stability of the country.

Assessing the impact of data-driven limitations on tracing and forecasting the outbreak dynamics of COVID-19.

The availability of the epidemiological data strongly affects the reliability of several mathematical models in tracing and forecasting COVID-19 pandemic, hampering a fair assessment of their relative performance. The marked difference between the lethality of the virus when comparing the first and second waves is an evident sign of the poor reliability of the data, also related to the variability over time in the number of performed swabs. During the early epidemic stage, swabs were made only to patients with severe symptoms taken to hospital or intensive care unit.