[arcticbull]

My data was older, and that difference is utterly irrelevant with a denominator so large, and there are many potential explanations. Especially since Italy, per my sources [4] in the parent post, assigns anyone who died while in possession of COVID as a COVID death. In fact they later announced up to 88% of their COVID deaths likely weren't actually COVID deaths but deaths of someone who happened to have COVID. So if we lop off 88%, well, it's hardly out of line.

[kgwgk]

> In fact they later announced up to 88% of their COVID deaths likely weren't actually COVID deaths

I wonder if you can back that up with a reference.

[arcticbull]

88% of CFR potentially not being COVID was from [1] referencing [2]. Specifically:

"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 about the available data."

"Report from the Italian National Institute of Health: analysed 355 fatalities and found only three patients (0.8%) had no prior medical conditions. See Table 1 in the paper; (99% who died had one pre-existing health condition): 49% had three or more health conditions; 26% had two other ‘pathologies’, and 25% had one." [2]

(For what it's worth in my reply I called it out as "[4] from the parent post" which is [1] here -- sorry for the confusion -- all I meant was that the Italian data skews very high, both because it's the oldest region [Lombardy] in the oldest country in Europe [Italy] -- and because they were very generous in how they ascribed cause of death).

[1] https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-...

[2] https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/12044372...

[kgwgk]

That's from one month ago and it doesn't mean that those people would be dead equally if they had not been infected.

Actually the official number is grossly under-reporting COVID-19 deaths:

"We estimate that the number of COVID-19 deaths in Italy is 52,000 ± 2000 as of April 18 2020, more than a factor of 2 higher than the official number."

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20067074v...

[arcticbull]

Time will tell, I suppose!

[kgwgk]

In the weeks from March 1 to April 4 there were 19824 people death in a subset of municipalities in Lombardia where data is already available, while in the last five years the number of deaths in the comparable period was in the 6767 - 7248 range. This subset normally accounts for 73% of the deaths in the region so we can estimate that there were 17000 excess deaths (27200 vs 9200-9900).

Less than 9000 COVID-19 deaths were reported in Lombardia by that time. If you think they are too generous classifying deaths as being caused by the infection, what would you say that caused the death of more than twice the usual number of people during the period?