The effect of population and tourism factors on Covid‐19 cases in Italy: Visual data analysis and forecasting approach

Abstract

At the beginning of 2020, the new coronavirus disease (Covid-19), a deadly viral illness, is declared as a public health emergency situation by WHO. Consequently, it is accepted as pandemic that affected millions of people worldwide. Italy is one of the most affected countries by Covid-19 disease among the world. In this article, our main goal is to investigate the effect of intensity of Covid-19 cases based on the population size and tourism factors in certain regions of Italy by visual data analysis. The regions of Lombardia, Veneto, Campania, Emilia-Romagna, Piemonte are the top five regions covering 58.50% of the total Covid-19 cases diagnosed in Italy. It has been shown by visual data analysis that population and tourism factors play an important role in the spread of Covid-19 cases in these five regions. In addition, a prediction model was created using Bi-LSTM and ARIMA algorithms to forecast the number of Covid-19 cases occurring in these five regions in order to take early action. We can conclude that these northern regions have been affected mostly by Covid-19 and the distribution of the resident population and tourist flow factors affected the number of Covid-19 cases in Italy. K E Y W O R D S coronavirus, Covid-19, forecasting method, visual data analysis 1 INTRODUCTION A new coronavirus disease that can cause fatal effects on humans, much like the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), emerged in late 2019. The symptoms of the disease first became evident in China in December 2019, and the disease was diagnosed worldwide as Covid-19 at the beginning of the January 2020. 1 According to the Covid-19 timeline drawn up by the World Health Organization (WHO) Covid-19, patients in China who were eventually diagnosed as having Covid-19 on December 31, 2019 showed symptoms similar tothose of pneumonia. The disease was then reported to be a new coronavirus disease. The WHO established its Incident Management Support Team to address the spread and impacts of the new coronavirus disease on January 1, 2020. On January 13, 2020, it was reported that the first Covid-19 case outside of China occurred in Thailand on January 8, 2020. In addition, as per official statements, the spread of the coronavirus disease was attributed to one patient who traveled to Wuhan, China and returned to Thailand. 2 The WHO's status report on January 30, 2020, revealed a total of 7.818 cases of Covid-19 worldwide, 82 of which were located in 18 countries outside China. 3 According to the WHO's case report of January 31, 2020, Covid-19 had spread to an additional country, taking the total to 19 countries outside China. 4 The country that reported these new Covid-19 cases was Italy. With the addition of Italy, the number of European countries that had reported Covid-19 cases rose to four. Reports of Covid-19 in Italy started with two people, who mentioned the city of Wuhan as being part of their travel histories. Marta et al. explained that these two cases, which were recorded in Rome, includ...

Líneas de investigación futura en turismo pospandemia. Un análisis de la literatura

“…La pandemia del Covid-19, como se ha esbozado, ha tenido un impacto adverso en el bienestar social y psicológico de las personas. En efecto, las reglas de distanciamiento social y las restricciones de movilidad por la cuarentena han inducido miedo a la separación de los seres queridos, pérdida de libertad, incertidumbre sobre el avance de la enfermedad y sentimientos de soledad, aislamiento, impotencia (Uğuz et al, 2022) y ansiedad (Mostafanezhad et al, 2020). Otros estudios han tratado incluso el efecto negativo de la pandemia en el bienestar de los turistas, ya que pueden enfrentar discriminación en los sitios turísticos (Yang & Wong, 2021).…”