Recovery during a crisis: facing the challenges of risk assessment and resilience management of COVID-19

The paper offers a disaster risk management perspective to analyze the COVID-19 pandemic and to propose and assess non-pharmaceutical mitigation measures for the recovery phase. Three main aspects are tackled: (i) the need to take a scenario-based approach; (i) the need to propose more fine-tuned and context-sensitive mitigation measures, the effectiveness and the cost–benefit of which must be carefully appraised; (iii) better communication as a fundamental pillar of any mitigation measure. Evidence and ideas from the field of natural disasters and man-made technological incidents are applied to tackle the health risk posed by the SARS-COV 2 virus and its rapid spread according to a multi-disciplinary perspective that addresses the health-related challenges and the need to avoid societal and economic breakdown.