A synthetic indicator on the impact of COVID-19 on community’s health

Resumo

We present in this paper an indicator that approaches the impact of COVID-19 on the community’s health, at this early stage of the pandemic. It consists of the product of the extent (ratio of those affected over the population) and a measure of severity (the intensity of the disease on those affected). We concentrate on the population of those seriously affected by the illness, rather than those infected, given the available data. The severity measure derives from the application of an evaluation protocol that allows comparing population distributions based on the proportions of those affected with different health conditions (the balanced worth, developed by Herrero & Villar (2013, 2018)). We illustrate the functioning of this indicator over a case study regarding the situation of the Italian regions on March 9 (the beginning of the confinement) and April 8th, 2020, one month later