First quarter chronicle of COVID-19: an attempt to measure governments’ response

The crisis caused by COVID-19 revealed the global unpreparedness for handling the impact of a pandemic. In this paper, we present a first quarter chronicle of COVID-19 in Hubei China, Italy and Spain, specifically their infection speed, death and fatality rates. By fitting distributions to these rates, we look for the effectiveness of government measures during the pandemic through a number of statistical approaches.