[Xist]

This article says that officials aren't trying to hide anything, they just do not have the resources to count everyone. Who knows how many asymptomatic carriers went unnoticed?

In the town of Coccaglio, an hour’s drive east of here, the local nursing home lost over a third of its residents in March. None of the 24 people who died there were tested for the new coronavirus. Nor were the 38 people who died in another nursing home in the nearby town of Lodi.

They only test people showing symptoms.

Another problem is that the number of virus carriers is also vastly undercounted. Italy has reported about 111,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus, but testing is mostly limited to those who show symptoms. Many virus carriers with no symptoms aren’t tested. Officials and health experts estimate the true number of infected people at anywhere from hundreds of thousands to six million.

Nowhere in Italy has been harder hit than Bergamo, a city of about 120,000 people. In March 2019, 125 people died in the city. This March, 553 people died. Of these, 201 deaths were officially attributed to the virus. This leaves 352 further deaths for the period, far higher than normal.

553 more deaths than last year for 120,000 people in one month. One in every 280 people died on top of the usual number.

In the wider Bergamo province, which comprises the city and more than 240 small towns and has a total population of 1.1 million, 2,060 people died in March from the virus. But some 4,500 more people died in the province in March than a year earlier, according to a new joint study by the local Eco di Bergamo newspaper and research firm InTwig that took data from 91 towns in the province.

A partial explanation may be an earlier line:

People are also dying of other ailments because hospitals are too overloaded with coronavirus cases to give them the treatment they need, doctors and local officials say.

“Other countries that have the good fortune to be seven to 14 days behind us have to use that time to erect defenses,” says Giorgio Gori, Bergamo’s mayor, who estimates the virus has spread so widely in his city that one-third of the population has been infected. “We were first, and we weren’t prepared. Any leaders looking at us and not reacting vigorously will have a lot to answer for.”

The health-care system in the region is so overstretched that doctors can’t treat all the sick. Those who die outside the hospital usually aren’t tested for the coronavirus.

At Dr. Colombi’s office, three patients who tested positive for the coronavirus have died in recent weeks. But an additional 20 people who died with symptoms associated with the virus weren’t tested.

An added problem is that 20% of Bergamo’s family doctors have been infected—and those still working only consult with patients over the phone. The local health service has responded to the high infection rate among family doctors by instituting teams of three to four doctors that make house calls in full protective gear. But with only eight teams for all of Bergamo, and each team able to make only about eight visits a day, many people don’t receive care.

There are signs the lockdown that was imposed on March 8 across Lombardy and two days later on the whole of Italy is beginning to have an effect. The rate of contagion has slowed, and fewer people are being admitted to the hospital. A study by a team of epidemiologists at Imperial College London estimates that Italy’s strict social distancing measures prevented about 38,000 deaths up to the end of March.

In Bergamo, so many coffins were accumulating in mid-March that a convoy of army trucks came to take them away for cremation elsewhere. In Brescia, the local diocese has offered 40 empty churches to store coffins as they await their turn for cremation, which can sometimes take up to two weeks. While funerals aren’t allowed because of social-distancing requirements, priests still bless the dead.
“One of the most difficult things to accept is that unfortunately many people are dying on their own, with none of their dear ones next to them,” says Brescia Bishop Pierantonio Tremolada, who gives regular blessings over the coffins in churches. “That is something we can still do for them.”

Italy’s Coronavirus Death Toll Is Far Higher Than Reported