ISTAT reported death counts for 1084 municipalities over Italy, in the periods January 1-March 21 for six consecutive years. This allows us to explore the possible exceptionality of 2020, during which there is a COVID-19 epidemic. Please note that this document reflects work in progress and it is an attempt to disply the data to facilitate reflection. The document was last updated on:

## [1] "2020-04-07"

We start with some backgroung information. Italy is administratively divided in Regioni, who are in turn divided in Province. To get a sense of the size of these, below are counts of the total population living in each regione and histogram of the population leaving in the various provinces.

We note that the data is limited in a number of ways. The 1084 municipalities represent only a fraction of the population in Italy, and differently distributed in the regions, as illustrated in the plot below. In the displays that will follow, when the aggregate value for a region or a province is determined from the 1084 municipalities, the transparency of colors is proportional to the proportion of population per regione or per province that lives in municipalities not included in this subset (more intense colors correspond to better covered region).

Another limitation is that the period up to March 21 includes only a portion of the deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the 2020 epidemic. For reference, we report the total number of deaths among the confirmed COVID-19 cases in Lombardy during March 2020 and the total number of deaths for all cause mortality in the same region in few previous years.

COVID-19 confirmed deaths in Lombardy in March 2020

## [1] 7199

All cause deaths in Lombardy in previous years months of March

## # A tibble: 1 x 6
##   `Mar-14` `Mar-15` `Mar-16` `Mar-17` `Mar-18` `Mar-19`
##      <dbl>    <dbl>    <dbl>    <dbl>    <dbl>    <dbl>
## 1     7790     9440     8385     8946     9068     9062

Furthermore, to put things into perspective, we display for each region the total deaths among the confirmed COVID-19 to date, and the fraction of these that occurred before March 21.

With these caveats in mind, we are now ready to compare the deaths counts in the 1084 municipalities over the 6 years reported. Rather than looking at the single municipalities, we group them by the regions or the province to which they belong.

Looking now into the provinces of the Lombardia region