Testing and isolation to prevent overloaded healthcare facilities and reduce death rates in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in Italy

Background During the first wave of COVID-19, hospital and intensive care unit beds got overwhelmed in Italy leading to an increased death burden. Based on data from Italian regions, we disentangled the impact of various factors contributing to the bottleneck situation of healthcare facilities, not well addressed in classical SEIR-like models. A particular emphasis was set on the undetected fraction (dark figure), on the dynamically changing hospital capacity, and on different testing, contact tracing, quarantine strategies. Methods We first estimated the dark figure for different Italian regions. Using parameter estimates from literature and, alternatively, with parameters derived from a fit to the initial phase of COVID-19 spread, the model was optimized to fit data (infected, hospitalized, ICU, dead) published by the Italian Civil Protection. Results We show that testing influenced the infection dynamics by isolation of newly detected cases and subsequent interruption of infection chains. The time-varying reproduction number (R-t) in high testing regions decreased to <1 earlier compared to the low testing regions. While an early test and isolate (TI) scenario resulted in up to similar to 31% peak reduction of hospital occupancy, the late TI scenario resulted in an overwhelmed healthcare system. Conclusions An early TI strategy would have decreased the overall hospital usage drastically and, hence, death toll (similar to 34% reduction in Lombardia) and could have mitigated the lack of healthcare facilities in the course of the pandemic, but it would not have kept the hospitalization amount within the pre-pandemic hospital limit.

Automated summary

During the first wave of COVID-19 in Italy, hospital and ICU beds were overwhelmed, leading to increased death rates. By studying data from different regions in Italy, the impact of testing strategies on infection dynamics was analyzed. It was found that early testing and isolation could greatly reduce hospital usage and death toll, but it cannot solve the issue of insufficient healthcare facilities.