Istat, together with the Higher Institute of Health, has produced a new analysis on Covid mortality in the past two yearswhich stops in February 2022. The Corriere della Serawhich explains how the study was based on the causes of deaths starting from the certificates completed by the doctors at the time of death. A sample is said to be representative of Covid deaths overall by age, territory and previous pathologies, i.e. comorbidities.
According to Graziano OnderISS geriatrician interviewed, it is possible that in comparison with other European countries with respect to which our death rate from Covid-19 appears higher there is an overestimate of about 10% of deaths from Sars-CoV-2 syndrome. Yes, it is the famous quarrel of the dead “with” Covid and those “for” Covid which many have opposed but which this investigation actually considers. For Onder, in fact, nine out of ten certificates “attribute the directly responsible cause of death to the virus” while in the remaining sheet the “death is due to other causes, among which the most represented are diseases of the circulatory system and tumors ». On balance, out of 161,336 victims, about 16 thousand deaths would therefore have occurred considering Covid-19 as a contributing cause or in any case not as a fatal pathology. On the other hand are evaluations that must be taken with a grain of saltIn fact, the report indicates that always 90% of the files show as complications conditions typically associated with Covid-19, such as pneumonia, respiratory failure, acute respiratory distress (Ards) or other respiratory symptoms. Covid-19 is the only cause responsible for death in 23% of cases, while in 29% of cases there is a contributing cause and in 48% there is more than one cause. The debate on the “for” and “with” Covid therefore remains slippery.
It is no coincidence that the World Health Organization has established the only reliable method for calculating lethality the comparison with the mortality data of the five-year period prior to 2020. That is, we mean the difference between overall deaths from any cause since the beginning of the pandemic and the expected level of deaths calculated on the basis of the average for the 2015-2019 period, assumed to be representative of the pre-covid mortality situation.
According to the numbers of the seventh joint report of the two institutes, “the excess of total mortality”, compared to the average of the previous five years (2015-2019), was 178 thousand deaths. Last year “a large part of this surplus was observed in the first four months, when vaccination coverage was still very low”. As the vaccination campaign progresses, the death rate is significantly decreased: 82% of Covid deaths in 2021 took place in the first four months of the year, before the widespread diffusion of vaccination could express its effects.
The comparison with the excess mortality over the previous 5 years “returns a more reliable picture of the impact of Covid on mortality because each country has calculated them as it believed, the United Kingdom, for example, has excluded from the count of Covid deaths those that occurred after 28 days from the infection, we instead include everyone »explains Onder al Courier. According to this comparison, it would certainly come out of it made very complicated by a multiplicity of variables and different considerations of the data, a different picture in which Italy would have many more victims than the Nordic countries and Germany but would be in line with France and would count much less than most of Eastern Europe as well as Belgium. Basically, as of July 2021, the excess mortality in our country would drop below the EU average.
The point is that according to the ISS in the lethality rate linked to Covid there are, as mentioned, many factors to keep in mind, which differentiate one country from another, indeed one company from another. For example, the climate that influences social life and, in turn, the propensity of people to be together (and therefore to favor contagion). Then there is the robustness of the health system, in particular with the capillary and balanced diffusion of intensive care beds (and operators). And there is demographic pie, given that after all Italy is still the second oldest country in the world after Japan. Before we had vaccines and drugs available, Covid-19 hit the hardest in the older age groups.
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Source: Vanity Fair
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