Mortalità da COVID-19: una epidemia senza denominatore. Ma conosciamo il numeratore?
COVID-19 death rate: an epidemic without a denominator. But what do we know about the numerator?

AUTORI

ABSTRACT

COVID-19 death rate: an epidemic without a denominator. But what do we know about the numerator?

Since many COVID-19 patients display few, if any, symptoms, assessing infection rate, hospitalization rate, and mortality rate is very challenging. Not only we do not know the denominator of these ratios, but in assessing the mortality rate, we also have problems to estimate the numerator. Between March and April 2020, Italy recorded 42633 excess deaths compared to the average of the five previous years. In the same period, 27 846 deaths were classified as due to COVID-19. Since the international definition of a COVID-19 case requires a microbiological confirmation of the presence of the virus, 34.7% of the excess deaths remain unexplained. Part of these may be COVID-19 deaths, left unconfirmed for the lack of a microbiological swab; but further deaths may be caused by delayed care of other diseases, due to the reluctance of many patients to visit the hospitals during the pandemic. The same apparent underestimation of COVID-19 deaths emerges for other European countries, with more evident differences in the United Kingdom and in the Netherlands. In other countries, the number of excess deaths is lower than the average of the previous years, probably due to a delay in recording deaths. In conclusion, we have uncertainty about the real number of victims of this pandemic; we will improve our knowledge when numbers will be no longer provisional, but there are areas where it is impossible to get the perfect assessment; however these figures are rather important to better face a possible further epidemic wave.

BIBLIOGRAFIA