A look at the spatio-temporal mortality patterns in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of mortality densities.

With the tools and perspective of Object Oriented Spatial Statistics, we analyze official daily data on mortality from all causes in the provinces and municipalities of Italy for the year 2020, the first of the COVID-19 pandemic. By comparison with mortality data from 2011 to 2019, we assess the local impact of the pandemic as perturbation factor of the natural spatio-temporal death process. For each Italian province and year, mortality data are represented by the densities of time of death during the calendar year.