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

Rodolfo Jaffe; Mabel Patricia Ortiz Vera; Klaus Jaffe

Country-level data on COVID-19 confirmed number of cases and deaths was downloaded from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/ download-todays-data-geographic-distribution-covid-19-cases-worldwide), and included all records up to March 30 th 2020. To assess COVID-19 growth rate (hereafter infection rate) and mortality rate, we excluded all records before a country reached a minimum threshold of 100 confirmed cases, as well as countries with less than 10 days of records and less than a total number of 1000 confirmed cases. Additionally, we excluded post-exponential growth records in countries where we observed that growth curves were beginning to flatten (China, South_Korea, Iran, Italy, Spain, United States of America, and Austria; exclusion dates are shown in Script_S1). These stringent filtering criteria ensured we had at least 10 continuous days with confirmed records during the exponential growth-phase, for countries that tested a minimum number of 1000 persons.