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Case fatality rate analysis of Italian COVID‐19 outbreak
Author(s) -
Giangreco Giovanni
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of medical virology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.782
H-Index - 121
eISSN - 1096-9071
pISSN - 0146-6615
DOI - 10.1002/jmv.25894
Subject(s) - outbreak , case fatality rate , covid-19 , demography , geography , public health , mortality rate , virology , environmental health , medicine , population , infectious disease (medical specialty) , disease , sociology , nursing , pathology
The Italian outbreak of COVID‐19 cases is a public health emergency and there is a worldwide tremendous interest in the evaluation of the Italian epidemic evolution. Indeed, from February 2020, Italy is facing an explosion of COVID‐19 cases. In particular, the Italian observed case fatality rate (CFR) is much higher than the other countries. Recently, it has been hypothesized that the extensive number of intergenerational contacts—typical of Italian culture—could contribute to explain the high number of deaths observed in Italy. However, through an analysis performed for all the Italian regions, here it is shown that the deaths are localized in specific regions and that the CFRs of different Italian regions are overlapping with the rates of European countries. Moreover, through correlation analyses between CFRs and different social habits, it is shown that no positive correlation is observed between social behaviors and CFRs. In conclusion, this analysis clearly rejects the possibility that social habits and intergenerational contacts can contribute to explaining such a profound effect on the number of deaths observed in Italy during the COVID‐19 outbreak and more effort should be addressed to evaluate the real amount of positive cases.