ITALY: first data on the number of accidents at work in 2020

INAIL recorded 554,340 accidents at work in 2020. This emerges from the provisional data it has just published. This represents a decrease of 13.6% compared to 2019 (641,638 accidents at work). On the other hand, the number of deaths increased by 16.6%: 1,270 in 2020 against 1,089 in 2019.

Nearly one in four cases of TA and around one in three fatal TA are linked to the Coronavirus.

The first nine months of 2020 were marked by a 21.6% drop in TA compared with 2019, while the last quarter saw a 9.1% increase. The health and social assistance sector stands out for the sharp increase in the number of reports of TA, which in almost three quarters of cases concerned coronavirus infection. In Italy, Covid-19 is recognised as TA in the same way as other fatal diseases: AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, tetanus, viral hepatitis, etc. In the United Kingdom, the number of cases of TA has risen by 9.1%. The increase is + 206% over the year (from around 27,500 cases in 2019, to more than 84,000 in 2020), with peaks exceeding + 750% in November and between + 400% and + 500% in March, April, October and December, compared to the same periods the previous year. It is only in January and during the summer period that there have been decreases ranging from -5% to -17%. There was a 22.1% drop in TA among men, but a 1.7% increase among women. The first increases were already recorded in March (+ 23.8%) and April (+ 2.4%), increasing in the last three months of the year 2020 (+ 45.2%).

INAIL also reports having registered 45,023 declarations of occupational diseases in 2020, 16,287 less than in 2019 (-26.6%). The most frequently reported pathologies are musculoskeletal disorders (28,164 cases), disorders of the nervous system (5,060), hearing (2,919), the respiratory system (1,808) and tumours (1,584).

Source (in Italian)