Fig. 1: Validating counterfactuals for the pre-pandemic data.
From: Estimating COVID-19 mortality in Italy early in the COVID-19 pandemic
we show the observed weekly mortality due to all causes for the period of 1 January to June 27 (black) in all 20 regions in Italy, and our prediction for the expected mortality in the absence of COVID-19 (conditional Gaussian Process (CGP) with its 1 and 2−σ error from the variance of the Gaussian model, i.e., 68% and 95% confidence interval, respectively, in green and synthetic controls method (SCM) in orange). The first reported COVID-19 mortality occurred in the week ending on February 22 (thin red vertical line). The historical data from 2015 to 2019 (blue) and corresponding historical mean (gray) is shown for comparison and are not a good fit to the observed pre-pandemic data. In the dashed-black line, we also show the observed mortality after removing reported COVID-19 deaths.
