Assessing the Effectiveness of the Italian Risk-Zones Policy During the Second Wave of Covid-19

Abstract

On 4 November 2020, the Italian government introduced a new policy to address the second wave of Covid-19. Based on a battery of indicators, the 21 administrative regions of Italy were assigned a risk level among yellow, orange, red, and, starting on 6 November 2020, different types of restrictions were applied accordingly. In this work, we extract the daily growth rate of new cases, hospitalizations, and patients in ICU from official data using an unobserved components model and assess if the different restrictions had different effects in reducing the speed of spread of the virus.