COVID-19: The Impact of Socio-Economic Characteristics on the Fatality Rate
*Corresponding Author:Received Date: Nov 01, 2023 / Published Date: Jan 21, 2025
Citation: Szulczyk KR, Cheema MA, Ziaei SM (2025) COVID-19: The Impact of Socioeconomic Characteristics on the Fatality Rate. J Community Med Health Educ 15: 912.
Copyright: © 2025 Szulczyk KR, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Objectives: The COVID-19 struck the world in 2020, and the number of fatalities and number of people testing positive continue to rise. Countries experience a high variability in cases and mortality. We aim to quantify the associations between a country’s socio-economic characteristics and COVID-19 related mortality in the world.
Study design: The study design includes the daily COVID-19 data for every country that is paired with the stringency index and a country’s metrics of socio-economic characteristics.
Methods: A two-step fixed-effects estimator is used to determine the daily COVID-19 fatality rate per million people as a pooled panel dataset. The first step estimates a negative binomial regression for the time-varying variables, while the second step uses a nonlinear least squares for the time-invariant variables.
Results: The daily COVID-19 fatality rate is positively related to the number of people testing positive per million people and the stringency index. Furthermore, a country’s medical resources are critical to lowering the daily COVID-19 fatality rate. A country with more medical doctors per 1,000 people and hospital beds per 1,000 people lower the COVID-19 fatality rate because this country has more medical resources to fight the pandemic. At last, a country with a higher percentage of elderly, obesity, diabetes, and urban population raise the daily death rate from COVID-19, while a higher life expectancy lowers it.
Conclusion: The results show countries’ socioeconomic characteristics influence the COVID-19 fatality rate. Governments could prepare against future outbreaks by investing in healthcare resources and initiating programs to improve their citizens' health.
