Provincial Level Time Series Analysis : Community Mobility and COVID-19 Daily Cases in Turin, Italy (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND Turin, a province in the Piedmont region sees second highest new COVID-19 infections in Northern part of Italy as of March 31, 2021. During the first wave of pandemic, many restrictive measures were introduced in this province. There are many studies that conducted time series analysis of various regions in Italy, but studies that are analysing the data in province level are limited. Also, no applications of Cross Correlation Function(CCF) have been proposed to analyse relationships between COVID-19 new cases and community mobility at the provincial level in Italy. OBJECTIVE The goal of this time series analysis is to find how the restrictive measures in Turin province, Italy impacted community mobility and helped in flattening the epidemic curve during the first wave of the pandemic. METHODS A simple time series analysis is conducted in this study to analyse whether there is an association between COVID-19 daily cases and community mobility. In this study, we analysed whether the time series of the parameter that estimates the reproduction of infection in the outbreak is related to the past lags of community mobility time series by performing cross-correlation analysis. RESULTS Multiple regression is carried out in which the R0 variable is a linear function of past lags 6, 7, 8, and 1 of the community mobility variable and all coefficients are statistically significant where P = 0.024043, 2.69e-05, 0.045350 and 0.000117 respectively. The cross-correlation between data fitted from the significant past lags of community mobility and transformed basic reproduction number (R0) time-series is obtained in such a manner that the R0 of a day is related to the past lags of community mobility in Turin province. CONCLUSIONS Our analysis shows that the restrictive measures are having an impact on community mobility during the first wave of COVID-19 and it can be related to the reported secondary cases of COVID-19 in Turin province at that time. Through further improvement, this simple model could serve as preliminary research for developing right preventive methods during the early stages of an epidemic.