Factores demográficos y económicos que afectan a la tasa de letalidad producida por el virus SARS-COV-2 a nivel mundial.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the state of the underlying conditions of countries in terms of the health system. This study aims to identify economic and demographic determinants that affect the COVID-19 case fatality rate in the periods of 30, 60, 90, 120 and 150 days after the first appearance of the virus in each country. The analysis is presented in two stages. In the first phase, a Cluster analysis is used with the K-means methodology for countries on all continents, which are classified into four groups: i. Countries infected very rapidly with a relatively high growth rate of contagion and low case fatality rate, ii. Countries infected rapidly with a very high growth rate of contagion and case fatality rate, iii. Countries infected slowly with relatively high growth rate of contagion and relatively low case fatality rate and iv. Countries infected very slowly with a low growth rate of contagion and case fatality rate. In the second stage, using the established groups in the first phase. OLS or Tobit models are estimated. The independent variables are pandemic, health capacity, economic, demographic and governmental variables. The results show that for countries infected slowly with a relatively high growth rate of contagion and a relatively low fatality, the pre-existing health condition (hospital beds) causes the collapse of the health system and therefore increases deaths. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the government is negatively associated with the dependent variable. The percentage of the population over 65 years of age affects the case fatality rate from COVID-19 in the groups of countries with high share of aging population. Finally, for countries slowly infected with low case fatality rate and contagion rates, the main factor reducing their case fatality rate of COVID-19 is the increase of the GDP growth rate.