A statistical analysis of the 2021-2022 Covid-19 Pandemic in Italy

In a number of previous papers, we studied the time evolution of the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy using a distribution of the type of Planck’s law with three parameters. In our 2020-2021 studies, we pointed out that, to study the evolution of the various waves of the pandemic, one should not use the simple number of daily positive cases, being largely dependent on the number of performed tests, but instead the ratio of daily positive cases per number of daily tests, ratio today sometimes referred to as: “positivity rate”. In these papers, we showed that, if basic conditions do not change, the Planck distribution with three parameters provides very good predictions of the positivity rate about one month in advance, with an error of a few percent only. Here, we first analyze the pandemic presently occurring (middle of January 2022) in Italy from the end of 2021. We first show that at the time of writing the present paper, i.e., January 25, 2022, we already are after the peak of this wave of the pandemic for what regards the positivity rate. We then predict the positivity rate at the end of February, i.e., in about a month from January 25. We finally introduce two new indexes by comparing the number of fatalities and persons in intensive care with respect to the measured positivity rates both during the pandemic occurring in Italy in the second wave (constituted by two close sub-waves around the end of 2020) and during the present wave of the pandemic during the end 2021/beginning 2022This is a preprint, to be submitted to a Journal