Italy was the first European nation to be affected by COVID-19. The biggest cluster of cases occurred in Lombardy, the most populous Italian region, and elderly men were the population hit in the hardest way. Besides its high infectivity, COVID-19 causes a severe cytokine storm and old people, especially those with comorbidities, appear to be the most vulnerable, presumably in connection to inflammaging. In centenarians inflammaging is much lower than predicted by their chronological age and females, presenting survival advantage in almost all centenarian populations, outnumber males, a phenomenon particularly evident in Northern Italy. Within this scenario, we wondered if: a) the COVID-19 mortality in centenarians was lower than that in people aged between 50 and 80 and b) the mortality from COVID-19 in nonagenarians and centenarians highlighted gender differences. We checked COVID-19-related vulnerability/mortality at the peak of infection (March 2020), using data on total deaths (i.e. not only confirmed COVID-19 cases). Our conclusion is that excess mortality increases steadily up to very old ages and at the same time men older than 90 years become relatively more resilient than age-matched females.

Although the increase in the number of centenarians is well documented today in countries with advanced demographic data, the same is not true for those aged 105 and over. The first aim of this paper, was to analyze the demographic characteristics of the 4,626 validated semi-super and 102 supercentenarians for the cohorts born between 1896 and 1910, referring to Italian Semi-Supercentenarians Survey (SSC). Then, starting from this data and from the survival  histories  in old ages - reconstructed by Vincent's Extinct - Cohort Method - for the cohorts born between 1870 and 1904, the most important aim was to analyze longevity history and the trend of gender gap of the Italian oldest cohorts beyond 100 years old.  The Italian centenarians and semi-supercentenarians increase from the first to the last cohort is due to the survival rise in old ages and the increase in the gender gap at extreme ages depends on the higher survival of women than men after 60 years old. Around 110-112 for both genders (for women in particular) a kind of resistance to further progress seems to appear in our analysis as in more recent studies on supercentenarians.

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The persistence of mortality decline at all ages, and particularly at older ages, means that an increasing number of individuals are becoming centenarians and semi-supercentenarians. Our hypothesis is that the gender differences in mortality level in old ages had an impact on the number of men and women reaching 100 years and so on the gender gap. Work-related international migration was also an important characteristic of Italian cohorts born in the last decades of the Nineteenth century, and in the first decades of the Twentieth, as these migrations affected more men than women. Referring to the Istat (Italian National Institute of Statistics) mortality data (Cause of Death Survey and Deaths of Resident Population survey) and the Semi super and Supercentenarians Survey-SSC, that has been realized by Istat since 2009, the aim of this paper is to present the development of the gender gap for the cohorts born between 1870 and 1912 beyond 100 and 105 years old. We have confirmed our hypothesis, explaining the characteristics of this development on the basis of estimates of the role played by the different migratory histories of the two genders and, above all, by the differences in the male and female survival trajectories of the cohorts in the study.

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