I found page 3 most remarkable: 48% of those who die of covid-19 in Italy also suffer from three or more other diseases (or did recently), and 99.2% suffer from one or more.
Before concluding that they contribute, the next question should be, how many people in that population at that age have ZERO comorbid diseases? Likely, it's very few. So these comorbidities may actually have little causal role leading to mortality. We can't know from just this data.
Until we learn more, we can't conclude 1) that comorbidities were causal, or 2) WHICH comorbidity really matters.
Not good for the US given the high obesity / diabetes rates here.
diseases N %
Ischemic heart disease 117 33.0
Atrial fibrillation 87 24.5
Stroke 34 9.6
Hypertension 270 76.1
Diabetes mellitus 126 35.5
Dementia 24 6.8 COPD 47 13.2
Active cancer in the past 5 years 72 20.3
Chronic liver disease 11 3.1
Chronic renal failure 64 18.0
Which might not be an optimal selection of things to count. It's not obvious that a small cancer three years ago ought to be counted and a bigger one six years ago not? But it's what they counted.
Just for clarification: did he have covid19?