Author: Nicolas Rossignol

The sudden appearance and exponential increase in severe coronavirus cases disease (COVID-19), and the resulting pressure on healthcare systems, have led almost all European governments to put in place measures to limit their economic and social activities.

For the first time in recent history, deliberate political decisions have generated an economic and social crisis on an unprecedented scale. While most of the consequences of this crisis are still ahead of us, the first real effects are already being felt with the shutdown of entire sectors of the economy, rising unemployment and an explosion in public spending.

Although all have been affected, the circulation of the virus and therefore, the strain on healthcare systems did not impact European countries with the same intensity. And the differences are even greater at subnational scale, with a very high concentration of hospitals being overwhelmed in a small number of regions while most others were largely spared. Many statistics have been published to help us to understand the dynamics of the pandemic at international level (e.g. by the World Health Organization, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the European Commission, and several European and North American universities). But little has been released so far to enable reliable comparisons about the kinetics of COVID-19 between European regions. Daily reporting of cases and fatalities flooded the media, but, in the absence of better and more standardised approaches to testing populations and recording deaths, the real diffusion of the virus and the real mortality rates remain largely unknown and inter-regional comparisons misleading.