  In this paper we develop a predictive model for the spread of COVID-19
infection at a provincial (i.e. EU NUTS-3) level in Italy by using official
data from the Italian Ministry of Health integrated with data extracted from
daily official press conferences of regional authorities and from local
newspaper websites. This integration is mainly concerned with COVID-19 cause
specific death data which are not available at NUTS-3 level from open official
data data channels. An adjusted time-dependent SIRD model is used to predict
the behavior of the epidemic, specifically the number of susceptible, infected,
deceased and recovered people. Predictive model performance is evaluated using
comparison with real data.
