If the death-coding practices in Italy do indeed differ from other countries' death-coding practices, then this is useful information.
It also brings to light how difficult it is to establish causality. There will always be a fraction of patients who would have died even had they not been infected with COVID-19. And there are also a fraction of patients who would have died even had they not had these comorbidities (i.e. COVID-19 was the "sole" cause).
The question is how to classify cause of death in a pandemic. I would hope there are guidelines to at least ensure consistency.
Consistent or not, however, I don't think it's a coincidence that COVID-19 struck at the same time we see this rapid rise in ICU demand.
Spain suffered
738 deaths over the last day, so perhaps they're also using the same death-coding practices as Italy?
One technique to tease apart the causal influences would be to look at rate of overall deaths-due-to-illness in these countries, from year to year, and compare that with the current rate. There'd be uncertainty around this estimate, to be sure, but it would be valuable data.