Honest Italians

The flu isn't hitting every country the same way, and much has been thought and said about this fact. Why, for instance, are the numbers out of Italy so much more ugly than numbers coming out of Scandinavia? Why is the mortality rate about 8% in Italy and more like 2% in Norway?

While the transmission speed of the flu can be attributed to differences in culture, the mortality rate is harder to explain. Transmission is a factor of social interaction, which is higher in Italy than in Norway. But why are Norwegians who get the disease 4 times more likely to survive than in Italy?

To answer this question, we have to keep in mind that the biggest difference between countries is not their health care system or general health of their populations, but the way things are recorded and published. Norway and Italy are not following the same rule-book. The difference in their statistics are therefore almost certainly due to this. While an old person dying with the flu in Italy is recorded as dying with the flu, an old person suffering from the very same disease in Norway may be recorded as dead from multiple complications related to old age and poor health.

Note that the Italians do not tell us if the patient died of the flu. What is noted is that the flu was one of the diseases that the patient was suffering from when he or she died. That's quite different from saying that the flu was the cause of the patient's death. The Italians list all the diseases, while the Norwegians note down the most prevalent one. Of the people in Italy who died with the flu, less than 2% were suffering from the flu alone. All other deaths were due to some combination of diseases.

By Juan Antonio Ruiz Rivas - Enciclopedia Libre en Español, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link