Those Italian COVID Death Revisions

 The Italian government says that article was incorrect:

Il Tempo Director Franco Bechis, who authored the article, told USA TODAY in an email his decision to apply the 2.9% figure to all COVID-19 deaths was based on previous action from the Italian National Institute of Health, whose experts used "a few hundred" medical records to describe the trend and impact of the virus across Italy at the beginning of the pandemic.

But the article's conclusion that only 2.9% of deaths were caused by COVID-19 is "completely wrong," said Pier David Malloni, a spokesperson for the Italian National Institute of Health.

 Graziano Onder, director of the Department of Cardiovascular, Endocrine-metabolic Diseases and Aging, also told La Repubblica that's not an accurate way of interpreting the report.

"It's all wrong, it's not true that only 2.9% of deaths are due to COVID," Onder told the newspaper, according to Google Translate. "Of course the vast majority of deaths are people who had pre-existing diseases but who very often were in good health, and they would have lived for many more years."

In most cases, he said, patients with pre-existing conditions like hypertension would not have died without first contracting COVID-19 – meaning the virus was the primary cause of death. Onder told the newspaper that, in Italy, there were 100,000 more deaths recorded in 2020 than in 2019.

"The reason for that increase cannot be the pre-existing chronic pathologies in many victims, which were equally widespread in previous years," he said. "That number tells the impact of the coronavirus in our country."

That makes sense.  Those with comorbidities died because of the addition of the virus,  Relatively few did of the virus alone.