Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: May 3, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: May 3, 2020 - May 17, 2020
Date Accepted: Jun 3, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jun 3, 2020
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
COVID-19 Fatality Rate and Performed Swabs in Italy: a Misleading Perception
ABSTRACT
CoronaVirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) fatality rate in Italy is controversial and is largely affecting discussion on the impact of containment measures that are straining the world’s social and economic fabric, such as large-scale use of isolation and quarantine, closing borders, imposing limits on public gatherings, and implementing nationwide lockdowns. The scientific community, citizens, politicians and mass media are arguing over data that seem to suggest that Italy has a significantly higher number of COVID-19-related deaths than in the rest of the world. Moreover, Italian citizens have a misleading perception related to the number of actually performed swab tests. Citizens and mass media denounce that the coverage obtained by COVID-19 swab testing in Italy is not in line with other countries all over the world. In this paper, we try to clarify both aspects by highlighting the actual numbers and by comparing them with the official data available world-wide.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.