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HEALTH

Have Italy’s official Covid-19 figures been massively under-reported?

Italy appears to have "underestimated" its coronavirus infection rate since mid-November by up to 50 percent, a government intelligence agency has warned.

Published: 29 January 2021 14:45 CET
Updated: 1 February 2021 09:17 CET
Have Italy's official Covid-19 figures been massively under-reported?
Photo: Miguel Medina/AFP

Italy's coronavirus indicators appear to be plateauing this week, as government ministers debate the extent to which they should ease the current restrictions.

CHARTS: Where is the coronavirus spreading fastest in Italy?

But on Friday, media reports citing a dossier from Italy's intelligence agencies cast doubt on the accuracy of some official data.

According to La Repubblica, an intelligence dossier delivered to outgoing prime minister Giuseppe Conte stated that the daily tally of new positive cases has been underestimated by 40-50 percent.

“The total number of infected people is underestimated due to the drop in the number of tests which occurred in mid-November 2020”, the document reportedly stated.

The dossier also said current data was unreliable, meaning that the epidemiological curve may not be going down as much as Ministry of Health data shows.

Italy's Higher Health Institute (Istituto Superiore di Sanità, or ISS) did not rule out the possibility that the data may be wrong.

“This is possible. In surveillance systems there is often a share of the cases diagnosed and reported that can be underestimated,” Paola Stefanelli, director of the ISS Preventable Diseases Department, told Radio Anch'io on Friday.

What caused the problem?

The issue appears to stem from a change to the way the Health Ministry records coronavirus swab testing.

Authorities added rapid test results to the figures in mid-November 2020. Before that, only molecular swab tests were counted in the data. 

This change, according to the intelligence dossier, created chaos.

“The introduction of rapid tests made it impossible to compare with past historical data,” it reportedly states.

“Some regions, moreover, do not distinguish between the molecular and the rapid tests, and this has obvious repercussions on the calculation of all values, including the positive ratio of tests carried out.”

The dossier argues that reporting methodology should be reviewed, separating the types of tests – not least because anyone who gets a positive result with a rapid antigen test must then have it confirmed with a molecular swab test, which are thought to be more reliable.

“It is only the first diagnosis swabs that give a picture the real epidemiological situation, and since mid-November we have seen a sharp decline in this type,” it stated.

Not all data are said to be affected.

The recorded number of deaths and ICU admittances are still believed to give an accurate picture of the situation in Italy.

Deaths recorded in Italy per day up to January 29th. Graph: Worldometers

What are the current figures?

The numbers of deaths and ICU admissions recorded, while fluctuating from day to day, do not appear to be dropping overall.

According to the Ministry of Health, the country on Friday recorded 477 new deaths, after 492 on Thursday, which fits into the broad range of a daily mortality rate of 300 to 600 recorded over the past three weeks.

This is in contrast to peaks in November and early December, when around 1,000 deaths were recorded on some days.

In its latest bulletin, the Ministry of Health said the latest data showed a per capita decrease in the infection rate.

The official data showed 14,372 new confimed cases on Friday.

It remains to be seen whether Italy's health authorities will update any data sets or take any other actions based on the dossier's findings.

Follow all The Local's coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy here.

Member comments

  1. “number of deaths and ICU admittances are the only accurate data available.” These were always the only accurate data available, but also the only data that matters. Case number trends are only helpful for predicting deaths and ICU admittances.

    If the actual number of cases has been higher than we thought, that’s good news. Those cases would have been low risk, healthy people who never needed medical attention, and their recovery will contribute to herd immunity and perhaps the death rate of COVID is not as high as we feared.

  2. In view of this new information, what would the actual total deaths to date be and what are the daily contagion figures?

  3. It seems to me that between announcing the correct numbers of infections and the availability of vaccines Tha Italy is doing a rather disappointing job of dealing with the pandemic.

  4. And now, with this massive under-reporting of cases, the government is recklessly relaxing the rules just as the vaccination campaign begins, meaning that we will see a spike in cases in late February and a return to a lockdown in March. Madness! Keep the restrictions in place until the most vulnerable are vaccinated and THEN begin the easing. The restrictions on travel between regions cannot be lifted until we reach community immunity, presumably in the late summer.

  5. It would be interesting to know the number of deaths or numbers in ICUs per 100,000 for each province ….Surely this would give a more accurate picture than positive test numbers – is this information available somewhere?

  6. I have read this article several times. I don’t understand what the article is saying, or is the absence of a conclusion deliberate?

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STATISTICS

Are Italy’s workplaces more dangerous than elsewhere in Europe?

Following reports of yet another deadly workplace accident in Italy, does the country really perform worse than its European neighbours when it comes to worker safety?

Published: 8 May 2024 10:48 CEST
Are Italy’s workplaces more dangerous than elsewhere in Europe?

On Monday, five workers maintenance workers were killed on the island of Sicily after inhaling poisonous fumes at a sewage treatment plant.

This latest tragedy follows the high-profile deaths of five workers at a Florence construction site in February, and the deaths of seven workers in an explosion at a hydroelectric plant outside Bologna in April.

The frequency with which these stories appear in the headlines can make it seem like there’s a major workplace incident every other week in Italy.

The issue even made it into this year’s Sanremo music festival with Paolo Jannacci and Stefano Massini’s performance of L’Uomo nel lampo (‘The man in the flash’), introduced by host Amadeus with a sombre reflection on the number of people killed on the job in Italy every day (around three).

READ ALSO: Rome square filled with coffins in protest over Italy’s workplace deaths

But does Italy really perform significantly worse than the rest of Europe when it comes to worker protections, or does it just sometimes feel that way?

According to data from the European Commission’s statistics office, Eurostat, in 2021 (the most recent year for which data is available) Italy had the eighth highest number of fatalities out of the 27 EU countries, with 2.66 deaths per 100,000 workers – worse than Spain and Portugal, but better than France and Austria.

The worst three countries for worker deaths were Latvia, with 4.29 deaths per 100,000, followed by Lithuania (3.75) and Malta (3.34); while the three least-fatal countries for workers were Finland (0.75), Greece (0.58) and Holland (0.33).

Workplace deaths in Europe in 2021. Source: Eurostat

If you look at Eurostat’s standardised incidence rates – which adjust for the fact that domestic economies rely to a greater or lesser extent on different industries that carry different levels of worker risk – Italy remains in eighth place, but performs slightly worse, with more than 3 deaths per 100,000.

Data from Italy’s state-run Workers Compensation Authority, INAIL, shows that worker deaths in Italy dropped from more than ten per day in the early 1960’s to around one third that number in the early 90’s, but haven’t significantly declined since then.

INAIL figures also show that 191 people died at work in the first quarter of 2024 – no worse than any time in the past decade, when the numbers have consistently hovered around 200.

That’s not good enough for workers’ rights groups, who say those in power are failing to enforce adequate worker safety protections.

The Palermo chapter of workers union CGIL staged a general strike and a protest outside the city’s prefecture on Tuesday, following a national protest calling for better worker safety protections last month.

Cardboard coffins fill Rome’s Piazza del Popolo on March 19th in a protest drawing attention to the number of deaths at work in Italy. Photo by Tiziana FABI / AFP.

“A business model based on contracts, subcontracts and precariousness is a model that kills,” CGIL general secretary Maurizio Landini told reporters.

Unions are calling for “continuous and comprehensive inspections, supervision of the contracting system, and more attention to the training of workers.”

Initial reports showed that none of the workers who died on Monday were wearing personal protective equipment. One was retired, and two were not technically qualified to carry out the works.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella described the incident as “yet another unacceptable workplace massacre,” adding that he hoped that “full light will be shed” on the causes of the accident.

In a 2023 report, INAIL’s supervisory board noted that the authority had a significant budget surplus, but that it couldn’t be used for accident prevention because current regulations ringfence the funds for compensation payouts.

The authority’s exclusive focus on building up financial reserves for insurance claims while neglecting to fund worker safety initiatives is counter-productive, the board wrote, “perpetuating a vicious circle that diverts resources needed for prevention by pouring them into the Treasury in excess of real needs.”

Instead of simply building up reserves, they argue, the institute should focus its efforts on “decisive intervention” to reduce workplace accidents, “including through the funding of prevention initiatives”.

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