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

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

Motivated by this observation, here we perform a detailed statistical analysis on a large set of potential socio-economic determinants and explore their potential to explain the variety in the observed coronavirus cases/deaths among countries. To construct the set of potential determinants we conduct a thorough review of the literature describing the social and economic factors which contribute to the spread of an epidemic. We identify a total of 35 potential determinants that describe a diverse ensemble of social and economic factors, including: healthcare infrastructure, societal characteristics, economic performance, demographic structure etc. To investigate the performance of each variable in explaining the coronavirus outcome, we utilize the technique of Bayesian model averaging (BMA) . BMA allows us to isolate the most important determinants by calculating the posterior probability that they truly regulate the process. At the same time, BMA provides estimates for their relative impact, while also accounting for the uncertainty in the selection of potential determinants [8] [9] [10] .