A year has gone by since the start of the pandemic. We managed to set up a research group starting from a Facebook chat without (almost) ever meeting in person. We set up monitoring and forecasting models, verifying their reliability and accuracy, day by day, before making them public. We had them evaluated and commented on by other colleagues, who felt they were valid for publication in prestigious scientific journals. We started national and international collaborations, made a ton of seminars, talked to journalists, and made friends with many beautiful and new people. In short, we started "a pandemonium" to study, propose, imagine solutions and actions in this terrible moment. And we are only 5. In Italy, there are many people of great competence on various subjects (sample design, for example), and they, like us, think, propose, imagine. Brains at work everywhere, some international excellences involved, a truly extraordinary scientific debate. Still, something is not working. There really is something wrong.
With all this intelligence, expertise, and tons of ideas available, what is the only solution currently available to "manage" the epidemic? Lockdown…. Despite this is (see the plot above) the weekly incidence situation in the Italian regions. The CTS and consequently the government use Rt estimated using Lombardy information at the beginning of March 2020 as a starting point and other methodological "subtleties" that we better not comment on. There is no statistical culture. There is a lack of adequate skills to analyze data. We have proposals. All of us statisticians have been working since March 2020 to make them available to decision-makers. Are you sure that there is no better approach than the use of Rt and a deterministic flow chart to decide on the everyday life of all of us?
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