Day 959: Excess Mortality: Italian Edition

While vaxx-driven excess mortality news has come out of Switzerland and Australia lately, today Eugyppius addresses a differently horrifying excess mortality story out of Northern Italy early in the pandemic:

Engler draws attention to the curious fact that early Italian excess mortality did not seem to spread from one Italian province to another – following virus infections outwards from an epicentre – but rather struck the affected regions all at once: [graph omitted]

What’s more, the excess deaths are clustered within the boundaries of the affected provinces, “meaning that which one of the 13 provinces a person lived in was a much better predictor of death than whether there was a high rate of deaths in neighbouring municipalities.” For Engler, this implicates provincial-level administrative decisions as to the rationing of care and provisions for the vulnerable, especially in the face of staffing shortages.