Italy Lies Too

One of the problems with data from China, is that to a fairly significant extent, they're not actually fibbing but rather guesstimating. And it's the bias in the guesstimating that's the tip off.

Now Italy has been "caught" doing the same thing. But "caught" is too harsh a word. Instead, Italy is dealing with one of the problems that China had: people dying so fast that they weren't tested or diagnosed at all.

In "Italy's Coronavirus Death Toll Is Far Higher Than Reported" in The Wall Street Journal, reporters show that deaths are far higher this year than in identical periods in previous years. Some of those are attributed to SARS-CoV-2, but many are not.

Bergamo, a city about the size of St. George, is a prime example. Last year, 125 people died there in March. This year it was 553. Of the extra 428, 201 had been diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2. That's 112% more. In the wider province around Bergamo, it's 118% more. It's not clear what the last date examined in the article is. But that figure for Bergamo province's official death toll is about 15% of those for the whole country (using today's numbers for that).

I can't find the source report for this:

Italy’s government-run statistical agency on Wednesday reported a nationwide jump in deaths for the first three weeks of March from a year earlier—particularly in northern Italy, where it found the number of deaths more than doubled in over half the hundreds of towns and cities it surveyed.

Bergamo is the worst place hit in Italy, so it's hard to know if the numbers in that report match those in the previous paragraph. But, we can probably use that to say that the upper bound on both official and unofficial deaths in Italy of about 28,700.