Governments need to tailor their pandemic response to take account of inequalities
The huge literature on the determinants of covid-19 infections and deaths finds that many widely assumed relationships do not always hold in the real world. Everyone knows that the old are most at risk; but Japan, where 28% of people are over the age of 65 compared with 9% globally, has seen remarkably few deaths so far. Some studies suggest that places that had bad flu seasons before the pandemic suffered less since; but other researchers have called that conclusion into question.
In a recent exercise Youyang Gu, a data scientist, ran multiple versions of a model that seeks to find correlations between 41 different variables and American state-level deaths from covid-19. Only three variables “consistently have non-zero coefficients”, he finds: inequality, population density and nursing-home residents per person. And of those three, inequality has the biggest effect.
Few other researchers rank the variables in the way that Mr Gu does. Yet our survey of the dozens of papers investigating the determinants of the toll from covid-19 finds that inequality has consistently high explanatory power. A recent study by Frank Elgar of McGill University and colleagues, looking at 84 countries, finds that a 1% increase in the Gini coefficient is associated with a 0.67% increase in the mortality rate from covid-19.
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