Avtor/Urednik		Lusa, Lara
Naslov		Identifying the Italian provinces with increased mortality during CoVID epidemics using the data made available by Istat - a methodological challenge
Tip		članek
Vol. in št.		, št. Vol. 44
Leto izdaje		2020
Obseg		str. 1-19
ISSN		2385-1937
Jezik		eng
Abstrakt		During the CoVID epidemics in Italy it became of great interest to investigate the number of occurred deaths, regardless of theirconfirmed CovID positivity. To address this problem, on April 1st the Italian National Statistical Office (Istat, Istituto Nazionaledi Statistica) published the data of a selected group of Italian municipalities, making available the number of deaths observed ona daily basis from January 1st to March 21st 2020; data were stratified by gender and in class categories. To make comparisonswith the previous years possible, the daily stratified number od deaths that occurred from 2015 to 2019 in the same periodwere also published. Later, the data were updated weekly and at the time of writing three data releases were available, whichincluded the number of deaths up to April 4th. Istat clarified that only municipalities with at least 20% mortality increasecompared to 2015-19 were included in the dataset.The selection method was criticized by the statistical community because inference and data aggregation at provincial or regionallevel was problematic, as the municipalities were not a random sample. If aggregated, the observed relative risks at provinciallevel were expected to overestimate the true relative risks. At the time of writing Istat announced a new data release where themunicipalities will not be selected based on the mortality data.To the best of our knowledge, so far there were no attempts to aggregate the data at provincial or regional level using a methodthat would take into account the selection method that was used by Istat. Our aim was to provide a permutation-based approachto identify the provinces with increased overall mortality in the period between March 1st and April 4th, compared to the sameperiod in 2015-2019. Our results, which are based on two different test statistics, identify 22 and 29 provinces (out of 103) with1 increased overall mortality, respectively. Most of the identified provinces are neighboring provinces in the northern regionsof Lombardia, Emilia Romagna, Piemonte, Liguria, Marche and Toscana, where most of the CoVID cases and deaths wereidentified. The performance of the method in shown also in anull case, where the mortality of 2019 is compared to 2015-18.
Proste vsebinske oznake		CoVID epidemics in Italy number of occurred deaths statistics epidemija CoVID v Italiji število smrtnih primerov statistika