True COVID-19 mortality rates from administrative data
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True COVID-19 mortality rates from administrative data Domenico Depalo1 Received: 15 June 2020 / Accepted: 19 August 2020 / Published online: 2 9 September 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In this paper, I use administrative data to estimate the number of deaths, the number of infections, and mortality rates from COVID-19 in Lombardia, the hot spot of the disease in Italy and Europe. The information will assist policy makers in reaching correct decisions and the public in adopting appropriate behaviors. As the available data suffer from sample selection bias, I use partial identification to derive the above quantities. Partial identification combines assumptions with the data to deliver a set of admissible values or bounds. Stronger assumptions yield stronger conclusions but decrease the credibility of the inference. Therefore, I start with assumptions that are always satisfied, then I impose increasingly more restrictive assumptions. Using my preferred bounds, during March 2020 in Lombardia, there were between 10,000 and 18,500 more deaths than in previous years. The narrowest bounds of mortality rates from COVID-19 are between 0.1 and 7.5%, much smaller than the 17.5% discussed in earlier reports. This finding suggests that the case of Lombardia may not be as special as some argue. Keywords COVID-19 · Mortality · Bounds JEL Classifications I18 · C24 · C81
1 Introduction In December 2019 in Wuhan, China, an infectious disease caused by a novel coronavirus was discovered. The disease, which was later labeled COVID-19, remained confined to China for several weeks. Starting in January 2020, the epidemic spreads outside China, first in Thailand, South Korea, and Japan, favored by an outflow of Responsible editor: Klaus F. Zimmermann Domenico Depalo
[email protected] 1
Banca d’Italia, Economics and Statistics Department, Via Nazionale, Rome, 91 - 00184, Italy
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travelers during the Chinese Spring Festival (Milani 2021; Qiu et al. 2020). Concerned by the alarming levels of spread and severity, on 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic. According to the official data released by the WHO, 1,056,157 cases were confirmed around the world by 4 April 2020, causing the death of 57,130 individuals (or 5.5% of confirmed cases). With more than 583,000 cases, Europe was the hardest hit continent at the time. Among European countries, Italy registered both the highest number of cases (almost 120,000) and the highest number of deaths (almost 15,000). Since then, the situation has worsened, reaching 13 million cases in the world and about 600,000 deaths (or about 4.5% of cases) as of mid-July 2020; Europe and Italy in particular are still among the most affected regions. The first case of COVID-19 in Italy was registered in Lombardia on 20 February 2020 and spread rapidly across the Northern Italian regions. With these scary numbers at hand, in Italy, a huge debate started concerning the number of deaths, the number of
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