Uncanny Weekly Death in Bergamo

Post #783

Jonathan Engler

at the PANDA Uncut substack reported almost 2 years ago on the high death rate in Northern Italy in early 2020. After obtaining some numbers myself, I focused on Bergamo province near Milan, the province hardest hit.

For a single city or province, perhaps the largest monthly increase in weekly all-cause death that has ever been recorded in the medical literature is Liverpool, England in 1951 (red line on right side is all-cause death, not just respiratory death like at left):

Note how at 4 weeks prior to peak (at -4 along the bottom) the death rate sat at 30 weekly deaths per 100,000. This baseline weekly all-cause death rate is high when judged by recent standards, as the average weekly death rate for the entire world in 2019 was only about half of that.

But 4 weeks later, Liverpool hit a peak weakly death rate of 120 per 100,000 — four-fold higher than where it had been just 4 short weeks prior. A quadrupling of weekly death in the time-span of under 4 weeks is unprecedented. Even the Spanish Flu of 1918 (black line) could not cause that much of an increase in weekly death in a month.

The upshot: When a death is by natural cause — such as diseases — then the top weekly rate can be 4x baseline (though, with externally-caused deaths, such as homicides, it can exceed 4x weekly)

A running theme in this substack is that COVID was never over twice as bad as flu, and this is especially true when comparing COVID to severe seasons of flu, such as 2014/2015 and 2017/2018. But take at look at the increase in weekly deaths in Bergamo province, cited as a weekly excess of 858.7% in the study (9.6x baseline):

At 1.16 million population, typical weeks in Bergamo have less than 300 deaths in them, but the week beginning on 18 Mar 2020 had over 2,000 deaths. When the 3 weeks found at each end of the time series are put together to find a standard deviation, check out how many standard deviations (measured as Z score) there are:

The peak week was over 85 standard deviations above the mean. To compare apples-to-apples regarding the highest monthly increase in weekly death rate which may have ever been recorded in the medical literature (Liverpool, 1951), here is the Bergamo weekly death rate per 100,000:

Notice how it begins below the baseline weekly death rate (30 per 100,000) in Liverpool, and also how it reaches a peak that is 50% higher than that found in Liverpool. The peak week at 9.6x baseline suggests externally-caused deaths (eg, homicides, etc.) due to being beyond the highest-ever recorded death increase from natural causes.

You would not expect the world record for monthly increase in weekly death rates to be broken during a time when the circulating virus was not more than twice as bad as flu. This strongly suggests that disease did not cause the death spike in Bergamo. It is not an increase which is conducive to death by natural causes (by diseases).

This means that we should look to non-disease external causes (i.e., accidents, suicides, homicides, etc.) in order to explain these deaths.

A follow-up post on this topic is here.

Reference

Matteo Scortichini, Rochelle Schneider dos Santos, Francesca De’ Donato, Manuela De Sario, Paola Michelozzi, Marina Davoli, Pierre Masselot, Francesco Sera, Antonio Gasparrini, Excess mortality during the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy: a two-stage interrupted time-series analysis, International Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 49, Issue 6, December 2020, Pages 1909–1917, https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyaa169

Some provinces showed staggering increases, with the percentage excess in Bergamo reaching 858.7% (95% eCI: 771.9 to 969.5%) in the week of 18–24 March (see Supplementary Data, available as Supplementary data at IJE online).

Viboud C, Tam T, Fleming D, Miller MA, Simonsen L. 1951 influenza epidemic, England and Wales, Canada, and the United States. Emerg Infect Dis. 2006 Apr;12(4):661-8. doi: 10.3201/eid1204.050695. PMID: 16704816; PMCID: PMC3294686. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3294686/

In Liverpool, where the epidemic was said to originate, it was "the cause of the highest weekly death toll, apart from aerial bombardment, in the city's vital statistics records, since the great cholera epidemic of 1849" (5). This weekly death toll even surpassed that of the 1918 influenza pandemic (Figure 1).