Using newspapers obituaries to nowcast daily mortality: evidence from the Italian COVID-19 hot-spots

Real-time tracking of infectious disease outbreaks helps policymakers to make timely data-driven decisions. Official mortality data, whenever available, may be incomplete and published with a substantial delay. We report the 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. We find that the mortality levels predicted using newspapers obituaries outperforms forecasts based on past mortality according to several performance metrics, making obituaries a potentially powerful alternative source of information to deal with real-time tracking of infectious disease outbreaks.