https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/italys-coronavirus-death-toll-is-far-higher-than-reported/ar-BB122QsjItaly's Coronavirus Death Toll Is Far Higher Than ReportedWall Street Journal, April 1, 2020
Many are dying uncounted as nation’s stretched health-care system struggles to save the living and accurately gauge human cost
MILAN–—In the town of Coccaglio, an hour’s drive east of here, the local nursing home lost over a third of its residents in March. None of the 24 people who died there were tested for the new coronavirus. Nor were the 38 people who died in another nursing home in the nearby town of Lodi.
These aren’t isolated incidents. Italy’s official death toll from the virus stands at 13,155, the most of any country in the world. But that number tells only part of the story because many people who die from the virus don’t make it to the hospital and are never tested.
In the areas worst hit by the pandemic, Italy is undercounting thousands of deaths caused by the virus, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows, indicating that the pandemic’s human toll may end up being much greater, and infections far more widespread, than official data indicate.
Italy’s hidden death toll shows what could lie in store for the worst-hit areas of the U.S., Europe and many other countries in the weeks ahead if the coronavirus is not tamed fast. The burden that the pandemic puts on health-care systems can cause so many deaths that it is hard to gauge the full human cost.
As stretched and sometimes overwhelmed hospitals fight to save their patients, many other people die unseen and uncounted, including elderly people in out-of-the-way locations. In addition, the health-care crisis can lead to a surge of deaths from other causes that would normally be treatable.
“There are many more dead than are officially declared. But this is not a j’accuse. People died and they were never tested because time and resources are limited,” Eugenio Fossati, deputy mayor of Coccaglio, says of deaths caused by the virus.
Properly tallying the number of deaths from the pathogen can help public-health officials map out a response to the pandemic, such as making sure hospitals are adequately equipped for the emergency. It can also influence how quickly and strictly governments should impose social-distancing measures, and for how long.
But collecting accurate data is challenging for Italy and many other countries, due to the speed of the pandemic and the fact that most countries’ public-health institutions are geared towards normal times. ...
The provincial cities of Bergamo and Brescia are the two worst hotspots, and have become symbols of Italy’s suffering.
In and around those two towns, the real number of deaths is probably at least double the official count of 2,060 in March for Bergamo and 1,278 for Brescia since the outbreak began in late February, according to interviews with local officials, doctors and funeral-service providers and comparisons with the numbers of deaths from past years.
People are also dying of other ailments because hospitals are too overloaded with coronavirus cases to give them the treatment they need, doctors and local officials say
Some 85 people died in the whole of last year in Coccaglio, a town near Brescia of 8,700 residents. In March of this year alone, the town’s main church bell has sounded the death knell 56 times. Only 12 of the deaths were officially attributed to the coronavirus.
“We know the real number is higher, and we mourn them, knowing full well why they died,” says Mr. Fossati, the deputy mayor. “It’s a hard truth to accept.” ...
The uncertainty about the death toll and the number of infected people makes it difficult to establish the true fatality rate of Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus. Estimates by epidemiologists of the fatality rate still range widely, but it is generally thought to be between 1% and 3% of those infected.
Italy’s government-run statistical agency on Wednesday reported a nationwide jump in deaths for the first three weeks of March from a year earlier—particularly in northern Italy, where it found the number of deaths more than doubled in over half the hundreds of towns and cities it surveyed.
“If you base any policy making on these numbers, you should be very careful,” says Lucas Böttcher, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has modelled fatality rates for Covid-19. “They can highly fluctuate during an outbreak.”
Nowhere in Italy has been harder hit than Bergamo, a city of about 120,000 people. In March 2019, 125 people died in the city. This March, 553 people died. Of these, 201 deaths were officially attributed to the virus. This leaves 352 further deaths for the period, far higher than normal.
In the wider Bergamo province, which comprises the city and more than 240 small towns and has a total population of 1.1 million, 2,060 people died in March from the virus. But some 4,500 more people died in the province in March than a year earlier, according to a new joint study by the local Eco di Bergamo newspaper and research firm InTwig that took data from 91 towns in the province. ...
Similar situations have played out across the Lombardy region, which accounts for 58% of Italy’s official coronavirus deaths.
In towns around Lombardy, local officials and doctors say the deaths recorded in March are many times the average monthly number. Often, the monthly toll matches deaths that towns normally record over half a year.
The health-care system in the region is so overstretched that doctors can’t treat all the sick. Those who die outside the hospital usually aren’t tested for the coronavirus.
“They are not receiving post-mortem tests,” Eleonora Colombi, a family doctor based near Brescia, says of people who die outside hospitals, such as in nursing homes. “Many of those who die and aren’t tested are old, but you normally don’t have so many people all dying at the same time. It’s corona.”
At Dr. Colombi’s office, three patients who tested positive for the coronavirus have died in recent weeks. But an additional 20 people who died with symptoms associated with the virus weren’t tested. ...
In Castellone, 31 people died between March 1 and March 26, compared with five in that period last year. About eight of the 31 deaths were officially attributed to the coronavirus, but about 10 more were probably caused by the virus, and a similar number by potentially treatable ailments, says Mr. Fiore. ...
It will take time for the number of daily deaths to come down, since many of those who are dying became infected weeks ago. For now, the sheer number of people dying is still overwhelming Italian towns. Funeral-service agencies that work with hundreds of funeral homes in Brescia and Bergamo say the number of dead they buried or cremated in March was more than twice the number in March last year. The stated cause of death is often just pneumonia, without reference to the coronavirus, they say.
Poll