Why coronavirus deaths in Italy are so high.

There are many factors involved in the reported high numbers of deaths due to Covid-19 from Italy. One that isn't receiving a lot of attention is how Italy codes death by coronavirus, a manner that lends itself to skewing the death-rate higher than reality. To be clear, I'm not saying Italy, or any other country who records death due to coronavirus in a like manner, is doing this to deliberately inflate or manipulate their figures. It's a matter of how they record and define the cause of death.

The Telegraph: Why have so many coronavirus patients died in Italy?

According to Prof Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health [...] "The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.

"On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity - many had two or three," he says.

Other experts have also expressed scepticism [sic] about the available data. Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says that countries do not yet have a good indication of how many mild infections they have.

-
The Telegraph Archived