Using newspaper obituaries to "nowcast" daily mortality: Evidence from the Italian COVID-19 hot-spots.
Real-time tracking of epidemic helps governments and health authorities make timely data-driven decisions. Official mortality data, whenever reliable and available, is usually published with a substantial delay. We report results of using newspapers obituaries to "nowcast" the mortality levels observed in Italy during the COVID-19 outbreak between February 24, 2020 and April 15, 2020. Mortality levels predicted using obituaries outperform forecasts based on past mortality according to several performance metrics, making obituaries a potentially valid alternative source of information to deal with epidemic surveillance.
['Buonanno|Paolo|P|', 'Puca|Marcello|M|']
D000086382:COVID-19 D005544:Forecasting D006801:Humans D020407:Internet D007558:Italy D015233:Models, Statistical D009524:Newspapers as Topic D011159:Population Surveillance
COVID-19 Forecasting Big data Excess mortality