Mortality patterns of COVID-19 in Italy: a historical perspective
by Simone Ghislandi and Benedetta Scotti in collaboration with Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital, Vienna
We compare mortality patterns and life excpectancy for the main pandemics experienced from 1952 till 2020 at provincial level in Italy. We build a new dataset based on the Census data from 1951, 1961, 1971 and 1981 and we use available infromation from ISTAT from 1982 till now. In addition, we use data from ISTAT to calculate also the human costs of the first wave of COVID-19 (January-June 2020).
The purpose of the project is to investigate the different demographic and geographical characteristics of the previous pandemics with the available information on mortality for COVID-19.