Was there "excess mortality" in Italy due to COVID-19 in March 2020?

Question

The European Mortality Monitoring Project (Euromomo) tracks

on a real-time basis, excess number of deaths related to influenza and other possible public health threats across participating European Countries.

They published an automatically updated map, which in Week 11, 2020 (i.e. March 9 - March 15) shows Italy as "no excess" in the "z-score".

However, there is no shortage of media reports describing a drastic increases in deaths due to COVID-19:

• Daily Mail, 19 March 2020

  The column of 15 army trucks manned by 50 soldiers brought the dead out of the city of Bergamo in Lombardy

  [...]

  It came as Italy recorded a record 4,207 infections and 475 new deaths from the virus yesterday,

  Cemetery in Bergamo can no longer cope with the mounting death toll in the city, where at least 93 have died

• Al Jazeera, 21 Mar 2020

  627 die in a single day in Italy

  Italy announced 627 more deaths on Friday, the biggest day-to-day increase in the country's four-week epidemic

• la Republicca, March 18, 2020

  as is now known, is that the mortuary in Bergamo has not been able to accommodate the coffin of coronavirus victims for days

  To relieve the mortuary of the cemetery - with no more space available - it had been necessary in recent days to line up the coffins of the deceased in the church of Ognissanti"

  

Why does this map not match the newspaper reports?

Answer 1

The Economist now has an (April 3) article on this, discussing the death stats from Bergamo specifically.

Official death tolls for covid-19 may exclude people who died before they could be tested. They also ignore people who succumbed to other causes, perhaps because hospitals had no room to treat them. The latter group has been large in other disasters. For example, when Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, America recorded only 64 deaths. A study later found that the surge in total deaths was close to 3,000. Many occurred in hospitals that lost power.

Such analysis is not yet possible for nations battling covid-19. The only European country whose total death rate (as calculated by Euromomo, a research group) had spiked by March 20th was Italy. This estimate is based on a group of cities. Unfortunately, Italy does not break down covid-19 deaths by city, precluding a comparison of covid-19 and total deaths in the same area.

However, journalists and scholars have crunched their own numbers. L’Eco di Bergamo, a newspaper, has obtained data from 82 localities in Italy’s Bergamo province. In March these places had 2,420 more deaths than in March 2019. Just 1,140, less than half of the increase, were attributed to covid-19. “The data is the tip of the iceberg,” Giorgio Gori, the mayor of Bergamo’s capital, told L’Eco. “Too many victims are not included in the reports because they die at home.”

(As a side note: until April 3, French reports didn't even include deaths in nursing homes.)

And for the broader context:

Comparable figures can be found across Europe. In Spain El País, a newspaper, has published the results of a study by the government’s health research centre, showing that “excess” deaths in the Castile-La Mancha region were double the number attributed to covid-19. Jean-Marc Manach, a French reporter, has found a similar disparity in the department of Haut-Rhin.

So yes, using more accurate local statistics, the extra deaths do "pop up" in graphs, even for the present level of uncertainty.

And actually EuroMOMO now (April 7) shows excess scores for several more countries:

The fact that Italy and Spain are in "the top" z-scores should be self-explanatory by now.

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Since there's a misleading chart (for all countries) posted in another answer below, here some updates on the total excess figures in EuroMOMO (not by country), compared to previous years/seaons:

The downward (post-peak) slope in the last chart for 2020 should be interpreted with caution, for there are extra delays in reports nowadays. Interestingly, on cumulated excess deaths, the data insofar for 2020 is enough to put 2020 above the prior years back to 2016:

Answer 2

The answer to this question is simply "the presented data was not yet up-to-date".

Compare the colour of Italy in the screenshot from the question for Week 11, 2020:

With a screenshot taken slightly over two weeks later of the exact same Week 11.

This change is entirely consistent with the warning at the base of the map about interpretation.

Answer 3

The Euromomo home page contains a a statement:

Note concerning COVID-19 related mortality as part of the all-cause mortality figures reported by EuroMOMO

Over the past few days, the EuroMOMO hub has received many questions about the weekly all-cause mortality data and the possible contribution of any COVID-19 related mortality. Some wonder why no increased mortality is observed in the reported mortality figures for the COVID-19 affected countries.

The answer is that increased mortality that may occur primarily at subnational level or within smaller focal areas, and/or concentrated within smaller age groups, may not be detected at the overall national level. This even more so in the pooled European-wide analysis, given the large total population denominator. Furthermore, there is always a few weeks of delay in death registration and reporting. Hence, the EuroMOMO mortality figures for the most recent weeks must be interpreted with some caution.

Therefore, although increased mortality is currently not being observed in the EuroMOMO figures, this does not mean that increased mortality does not occur in some areas or in some age groups, including mortality related to COVID-19."

TL;DR
A lot of people died in a small area (city of Bergamo) but in the large numbers of the whole country (Italy) there is no unusual excess mortality.

Answer 4

Well, if you take a town like Nembro (in the province - not the city - of Bergamo) that has a population of 11,518 and then use a ratio per 100,000, of course one single death will show up as way out of the baseline roughly 10 times more).

However, if you do analyze excess mortality in absolute numbers (and I believe this is the original question), there are less people dying every week all over Europe than in the similar period of the last 3 years.

From the original Euromomo link, the pooled number of deaths: