Determinación de la probabilidad de muerte por COVID-19 en el Ecuador, utilizando características individuales y contextuales de sus habitantes en el periodo enero-2021 - abril-2022.

Abstract

Generally, pandemics experienced by mankind throughout history have disproportionately affected the health of the inhabitants in the different geographic regions where they spread. The present study seeks to identify those factors that were significant for the lethality of COVID-19 in the inhabitants of the cantons of Ecuador during the period February 2020 - April 2022. The lethality of COVID-19 is the ratio between the number of people who died from the disease in a time interval and the number of people infected during the same time interval. In this study, four stages of the pandemic are identified: i. Isolation, ii. Social Distancing, iii. Vaccination and iv. Post-Pandemic. For the study of the factors affecting COVID-19 lethality, we used data at the individual level, corresponding to patients who reported confirmed and probable cases of COVID-19 whose information was collected by different secretariats of the Ministry of Public Health of Ecuador, and data at the contextual level of the cantons where the individuals reside, obtained from different institutional sources in the country. A multilevel logit methodology was used to consider the correlation between individuals within a canton and to determine the geographical effect of the cantons where individuals reside on their probability of death from COVID-19. The results show that individual-level characteristics such as sex and age as well as contextual characteristics such as comorbidities are significant.