Four in 10 extra deaths in Lombardy not linked to Covid-19

About 24,000 more people died in Lombardy than expected between January and April, and only 14,000 of these deaths were confirmed as being related to Covid-19, according to a new study led by researchers at UCL and Imperial College London. The study, published in PLOS ONE , looked at the number of deaths in each of the 7,251 local authority areas of Italy during the first four months of the year and compared these figures with predictions based on data from 2016-2019. It found that Lombardy had the most excess deaths of any region in Italy. After comparing with official data on confirmed Covid-19 deaths, the researchers estimated that there were still 10,197 more deaths than predicted based on past trends, or 43% of all excess deaths. Researchers say this may be attributable to delayed or reduced access to healthcare for other health issues, while some of the deaths may have been people with Covid-19 whose deaths were not recorded as such, perhaps because they were not tested for the virus. Professor Gianluca Baio (UCL Statistical Science) said: "Calculating excess deaths is important because it tells us how many more people died in a given period than we could have predicted. This gives the full scale of the tragedy, going beyond confirmed Covid-19 deaths to include deaths that were an indirect result of the pandemic.