The incremental impact of comorbidities in COVID-19-related deaths compared to patients dying from cancer or cardiovascular disease

We performed an electronic search on the website of the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), under the menu item “Number of pathologies for initial cause of death”. The search focused on COVID-19 and on the two leading causes of death in Italy and the rest of the world (i.e., cardiovascular disease and cancer) during the first two years of the pandemic (i.e., 2020 and 2021). The cumulative mortality for each of the three conditions was retrieved in absolute numbers, the mean number of deaths was calculated between the 2020 and 2021 values, and this mean value was then stratified by the number of comorbidities reported in the registry at the time of death (from 1 to 6 or more). The number of deaths of patients with single comorbidity was used to standardize the number of deaths of patients with more than one comorbidity. Although the proportion of deaths in patients with more than one comorbidity increased progressively for all three pathologies, the ratio ranged from 4.8 to 12.1 for cardiovascular disease, from 5.0 to 12.5 for cancer, while the ratio for COVID-19 increased exponentially from 9.3 in patients with two comorbidities up to 136.7 in patients with six or more comorbidities. These findings imply that enhanced prevention against the risk of contracting SARS-CoV-2 infection needs to be planned especially in patients with comorbidities.