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OK, first, I need to say this: that news article has a number of false claims. Most notably, it claims that the fatality rate (# deceased / # infected) is 1-3%. Regardless of your opinions on the paper being discussed here, no credible source believes that the IFR for this virus is over 1%. That information is simply wrong. That said, the claim for 45,000 excess deaths in March and April appears to come from this: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... With this table having the details: https://www.thelancet.com/cms/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31865-1/... The 45,000 number in that table is for all of Italy, whereas Lombardy specifically had excess mortality of 25,212 in March and April, with another ~700 in May. So that's 420 excess deaths a day in March/April, over a baseline of 275 (16,480 deaths in Lombardy, on average, for March and April of 2015-2019). This is nowhere near the 650 excess deaths per day you claimed in the GGP comment, but is a factor of about 2.5x over baseline. For whatever it's worth, here's a paper that makes a claim of a much lower excess mortality figure of 5740 for Bergamo, and 3703 in Lombardy in the first four months of 2020, using better-controlled models for mortality in the regions: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7520169/ I think it's somewhat pointless to debate the exact number of people dying every day, because we'll never know, and in any case, the virus was clearly quite deadly in that place at that time. However, both of these sources note that excess mortality spiked in March and April, and by May, had returned to below normal levels. So whatever happened in Lombardy, it was a statistical anomaly, and we should be careful extrapolating from it. Did the virus cause significant excess mortality in Lombardy in March and April? Yes. Could the flu cause similar levels of excess mortality in a naive population? It can, and it has. The 1958 pandemic killed about 116,000 people in the US, which is well above the 12,000-60,000 people we see per year in modern times, and worse on a population-adjusted basis: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1957-1958-pandemi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_influenza_statis... People like to make comparisons to the 1918 pandemic, but if anything, Covid-19 appears to be on par with the 1958 pandemic in terms of overall severity. |