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

Rodolfo Jaffe; Mabel Patricia Ortiz Vera; Klaus Jaffe

We gathered country-level climate and socio-economic data using the countries Alpha-2 and Alpha-3 codes and their centroid coordinates (https://gist.github.com/tadast/8827699#file-countries_codes_and_coordinates-csv). Climate data included mean monthly temperature, precipitation and water vapor pressure (calculated between January and March), and was extracted from WorldClim 10 Arc-minutes rasters (https://worldclim.org/data/worldclim21.html) using each country's centroid. Socio-economic data included GDP per capita (current US$), electric power consumption (kWh per capita), Human Capital Index (HCI), total population, rural population (% of total population), population ages 0-14 (% of total population), population ages 65 and above (% of total population), imports of goods and services (current US$), international tourism (number of arrivals), and scientific and technical journal articles (number), downloaded from the World Bank (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator) and Domestic General Government Health Expenditure (GGHE-D)