Covid-19 and its impact on Italian mortality

Kennisbank •
Donato Leone, Giampaolo Crenca, Vincenzo Simonelli

Numerous analyses have been carried out in Italy since the beginning of the pandemic, to study its behaviour and try to predict its progress.

Covid-19 and its impact on Italian mortality

One of the central themes of the analyses is certainly the impact that this virus can have on mortality respect to the situation in absence of Covid-19 considering also the “indirect effect” of Pandemic. Think, for example, of people who die from other diseases, because they could not find a hospital bed or because they did not go there for fear of contagion, or the reduction of road fatalities or accidents at work due to the lockdown in Italy.


In a study of the INPS (the National Social Security Institute), carried out by the Institute's "General Statistical – Actuarial Coordination", it was tried to determine a number of expected deaths in the first 4 months "baseline" based on the daily deaths observed in the last 5 years and comparing it with the number of deaths recorded in 2020; the conclusions of this study would indicate that 2020 overmortality, in the hypothesis that it is attributable to Covid-19, would show an underestimate of Covid-19 deaths compared to the data of “Protezione Civile” of about 19,000 units in the period March – April.