Italy's nursing homes may harbor uncounted coronavirus deaths

Italy is one of the hardest hit parts of the world when it comes to the new coronavirus.

The country has seen more than 2,500 deaths from COVID-19, adding 475 in just the past day. But an untold number of additional deaths may be attributable to coronavirus as nursing homes see a "silent surge in fatalities," Reuters reports.

Italy comes behind China in reporting the second highest total of coronavirus cases of any country in the world, with 30,000 people confirmed to have the virus. "But strict testing rules mean only patients hospitalized with severe symptoms are normally being swab tested," Reuters writes, meaning there are probably many untested cases out there. And with officials, nurses, and relatives reporting a "spike in nursing home deaths," especially in northern Italy, government officials and people running nursing homes suspect those fatalities stem from undiagnosed COVID-19 cases.

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"There are significant numbers of people who have died but whose death hasn't been attributed to the coronavirus because they died at home or in a nursing home and so they weren't swabbed,” Giorgio Gori, mayor of Bergamo in northern Italy, told Reuters. Emilio Tanzi, who runs a 460-bed nursing home in the north, meanwhile said he had seen an "anomalous" rise in deaths since the beginning of March.

Tanzi was sure to note that those deaths can't be directly tied to COVID-19, and there's no hard data that could provide a number of nursing home deaths. Read more at Reuters.