Covid today Italy, must death calculation be changed? What the experts say

Deaths with Covid and for Covid, many invoke a different method of counting in light of the high number of daily deaths in Italy. For the president of the National Federation of Orders of Surgeons and Dentists, Filippo Anelli, “if one dies and is positive for Covid, he must be classified, as has been done so far, among the deaths attributable to the disease, as the occurrence of the disease from Covid represents a contributing cause of death “. Rings, however, also returns to point the finger at the prolonged cuts to the National Health Service, which over the years have led to a sharp reduction in personnel, also due to an “objective difficulty in providing assistance. This – he stresses – determines a system less efficient, a system that often does not manage to provide adequate assistance, in the necessary ways and times. In other words: if you arrive at the hospital late, if there is a lack of staff in the hospitals, the risks also rise “, he told Adnkronos Health. . He also reads “The calculation of deaths from Covid in Italy is absolutely right”, according to virologist Andrea Crisanti, director of the Department of Molecular Medicine at the University of Padua. “It’s a simple matter of mathematical logic” and whoever wants to count them in another way “is wrong”, he says to Adnkronos Salute. Crisanti explains: “The probability of an 80-85 year old elderly person with different pathologies of death regardless of Covid in a single day is one in a thousand, and in the same age group the probability that this person is infected with Covid is 4 out of a thousand, so the probability that a person will die of any other pathology and be infected with Covid and that Covid has nothing to do with it is very low equal to 4 in 1 million. So the contribution for own causes coinciding with Covid is negligible “. This is why “the calculation that is made today is correct”. For the virologist of the University of Milan, Fabrizio Pregliasco, the daily calculation of the number of deaths “must remain as it is because it is important for statistical purposes to have a standardized ‘historical'”. “If the classification mechanism is changed, in fact – says Pregliasco to Adnkronos Salute – the entire history of the disease is lost, but the description of the cases should be broadened, adding additional information that better distinguish and photograph the single death and the impact of the disease “.