Basic Principles of Public Health Measures for the Prevention of the Diffusion of COVID-19

Abstract

The advent of COVID-19 poses severe challenge to the management of health worldwide. With no cure and no vaccine in place when the pandemic first surged early in 2020, the only possible measure to reduce the burden of this novel and mostly unknown disease was the adoption of non-pharmaceutical measures. Because the short-, medium-, and long-term implications and consequences of this disease are still undetermined, we can only rely on what we know from similar conditions and scenario, monitoring the outcomes and modeling the response to the pandemic accordingly.