Gender specific excess mortality in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic accounting for age

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, data have been accumulated to examine excess mortality in the first half of 2020. Mortality in the preceding year or years is used to calculate the expected number of deaths, which is then compared with the actual number of deaths in 2020. We calculated weekly age- and sex-specific mortality rates for 93.1% of the Italian municipalities for the years 2015-2019 and for the first 26 weeks in 2020. We assumed the mortality experience during 2015-2019 as the reference period to calculate standardised mortality ratios. Furthermore, in order to compare the mortality experience of males and females, we calculated sex- and age- specific weekly direct standardised mortality rates and differences between the observed and expected number of deaths. We observed considerable changes in the demographics in the Italian population between the years 2015 and 2020, particularly among people 60 years and older and among males. The population is aging and the proportion of elderly males has increased, which was not reflected adequately in previous estimates of excess mortality. Standardized excess mortality results show that in Italy between the 8th and 26th weeks in 2020, there were 33,035 excess deaths, which is only 643 fewer deaths than the official COVID-19 death toll for this time period. A comparative increase in the mortality rates was observed in March among both sexes, but particularly for males. Comparisons with recently published data show considerably higher excess deaths, but these data were either not covering the complete country or did not account for age and sex. Neglecting the demographic changes in a region, even over a short time span, can result in biased estimates.

Automated summary

Through comparing data from Italy between 2015-2019 and the first 26 weeks of 2020, it was found that the excess mortality remained higher than the official COVID-19 death toll, especially among elderly males. The population aging and increase in proportion of elderly males may have contributed to biases in previous estimates of excess mortality.