The Coronavirus pandemic and inequality in Italy

We start by summa-rizing the main features of the Italian National healthcare system in Sect. 2 explaining some of the key dimensions of existing socio-economic and health inequalities before the pandemic outbreak. Section 3 reports on the main published evidence of the impact of the pandemic on socio-economic inequalities, health, and access to health care. This section also describes the main interventions introduced by the Italian government to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on the economy and individual households. It focuses on the impact of lockdowns, occupational inequali-ties and on how the health risks of COVID-19 were distributed. Similar to the work of Blundell et al. (2020), we relate these to some other existing dimensions of inequality, namely, geography, socio-economic status, age, gender, and migrant status. We report on the impacts of the crisis on employment opportunities and the ability to work and describe the main interventions introduced by the Italian government to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on the economy and individual households.