The socio-economic determinants of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic

Viktor Stojkoski; Zoran Utkovski; Petar Jolakoski; Dragan Tevdovski; Ljupco Kocarev

Clearly, the interpretation of our analysis requires a more detailed background due to several reasons. Among these reasons is the fact that we include several potential determinants only through crude approximations. In particular, the level of social mixing is given simply as the average number of persons in a household or the dominant religion in the country. We do not follow the exact social network structures within a population. It is evident that the inhomogeneous nature of these spatial patterns has an essential role in propagation of diseases [17] . In this regard, in future versions of this study we aim to incorporate more detailed measures which capture the essence of social connectedness [77] the degree of individualism [78] and/or community mobility data 3 . In addition, the spread of the coronavirus is obviously still in a transient regime. Even though, we include a proxy for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic in each country, this essentially hinders the development of a coherent modeling framework.