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The need for accurate statistics has never been felt so deeply as the novel COVID-19 pathogen spreads around the world and quantifying its severity is a primary clinical and public health issue. In Italy, the magnitude and increasing trend of the case-fatality risk (CFR) is fueling the already high levels of public alarm. In this paper, we highlight that the widely used crude CFR is an inaccurate measure of the disease severity since the pandemic is still unfolding. With the goal to improve its comparability over time and across countries at this stage, we then propose a demographic adjustment of the CFR that addresses the bias arising from differential case ascertainment by age. When applied to publicly released data for Italy, we show that until March 16 our adjusted CFR was similar to that of Wuhan – the most affected Chinese region, where COVID-19 has now been contained. This indicates that our adjusted CFR improves its comparability over time, making an important tool to chart the course of the COVID-19 pandemic across countries. Since March 16, the Italian COVID-19 outbreak has entered a new phase, with the northern and southern regions following different trajectories. As a result, our adjusted CFR has been increasing between March 16 and March 20. Data at the subnational level are needed to correctly assess the disease severity in the country at this stage.