Globalized low-income countries may experience higher COVID-19 mortality rates

Rodolfo Jaffe; Mabel Patricia Ortiz Vera; Klaus Jaffe

Our analyses suggest that COVID-19 infection rates are affected by imports, international tourism, and scientific productivity (Fig. 3) . Since imports of goods and services, international tourism, and the number of scientific articles were highly correlated (Fig. 5) , these three variables seem to be representing how open, globalized or integrated countries are . Our findings thus indicate that globalized countries could have experienced multiple and recurrent introductions of the virus via imported goods, tourists, or international exchanges of students or academics (Anzai et al., 2020; Chinazzi et al., 2020) . Importantly, local climate (represented by mean temperature, precipitation and vapor pressure) was not found associated with infection rates, supporting a recent study (Luo et al., 2020) and contradicting an evaluation from 31 provincial-level regions in mainland China (Shi et al., 2020) and a global analysis (Ficetola & Rubolini, 2020) . The discrepancy between our results and those from Ficetola and Rubolini (2020) may be due to the fact that they calculated exponential growth rates over a period of five days, and assessed a more limited number of predictor variables. Given that we explicitly included the same climatic variables (retrieved from the same source using their described method), and used a larger and more stringent dataset (at least 10 continuous days with confirmed records during the exponential growth-phase, for countries that tested at least 1000 persons), we believe that our statistical analyses should be robust enough to detect an effect of climate should there be one.