We use the data from Johns Hopkins University about global deaths and global confirmed cases.
The program that produces the plots is available as report-United Kingdom-Italy.Rmd. It is easy to download the program and to modify the relevant parameters for your own experiments, see the README for more details.
(In Firefox, the links above raise a “Blocked by Content Security Policy”, but can be opened with “Open Link in New Tab”.)
Italy enforced its first day of nationwide lockdown on the 10th of March.
By the 10th of March the UK had experienced its first 6 deaths.
The UK enforced lockdown on the 23rd of March.
If we compare Italy with the UK at the time when UK lockdown first started we see that there is aproximatly a 15 day lag.
We can see that in the latest comaprison the lag is still 15 days.
When the lag is zero we can see clearly that the growth in deaths for the two countries is the same but the UK is a few weeks behind Italy.
UK growth now faster than it was in Italy. To match up the two curves 10 days later, one has to reduce the lag by a week.