Italian national policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic: The case of the Friuli-Venezia-Giulia and Umbria Regions

Italy was the first European country to experience a huge outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and to implement various policies in order to contain the spread of the virus. This paper analyses the effects of policies implemented by the Italian government in response to the virus's spread in the first and the second wave of the pandemic. We analyze 307 municipalities of the Friuli-Venezia-Giulia and Umbria regions from 2 April 2020 to 7 February 2021. Our results show that the first relaxation policy implemented immediately after the lockdown had only a slight impact on the virus's spread. Moreover, we find that the mild restriction policy (orange zone) implemented during the second wave in Umbria was successful in containing the virus's spread in November 2020. However, this policy proved to be ineffective in countering new, more contagious variants of the virus.