Analysis on the COVID-19 Impact on the Deaths Tendency in Italy and Europe

Due to the arrival of COVID-19 in Italy and Europe, there has been a significant increase in deaths recorded in the year 2020. This increase is not justified by the number of deaths recorded for COVID-19. The hypothesis is that the deaths recorded for COVID-19 are underestimated. This study aims to estimate the possible number of unrecorded COVID-19 deaths using a predictive model built based on historical deaths recorded from 2015 to 2019. The estimate was calculated by comparing the number of deaths expected according to the prediction for the year 2020 under normal conditions with the deaths recorded during the pandemic in the same period, which runs from March to September 2020. Through the comparison, it was possible to obtain an estimate of the number of excess deaths, which represented how much the arrival of the coronavirus had affected the increase in deaths recorded. From the number of extra deaths, the number of COVID-19 deaths that were reported and recorded by official national sources was subtracted to get an idea of how many COVID-19 deaths might not have been recorded.