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

  1. Rodolfo Jaffé
  2. Mabel Ortiz
  3. Klaus Jaffé

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Abstract

Understanding the factors underpinning COVID-19 infection and mortality rates is essential in order to implement actions that help mitigate the current pandemic. Here we evaluate how a suit of 15 climatic and socio-economic variables influence COVID-19 exponential growth-phase infection and mortality rates across 36 countries. We found that imports of goods and services, international tourism and the number of published scientific papers are good predictors of COVID-19 infection rates, indicating that more globalized countries may have experienced multiple and recurrent introductions of the virus. However, high-income countries showed lower mortality rates, suggesting that the consequences of the current pandemic will be worse for globalized low-income countries. International aid agencies could use this information to help mitigate the consequences of the current pandemic in the most vulnerable countries.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.03.31.20049122: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.03.31.20049122 on medRxiv