On the relationship between COVID-19 reported fatalities early in the pandemic and national socio-economic status predating the pandemic.

ABSTRACT: This study investigates the relationship between socio-economic determinants pre-dating the pandemic and the reported number of cases, deaths, and the ratio of deaths/cases in 199 countries/regions during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis is performed by means of machine learning methods. It involves a portfolio/ensemble of 32 interpretable models and considers the case in which the outcome variables (number of cases, deaths, and their ratio) are independent and the case in which their dependence is weighted based on geographical proximity. We build two measures of variable importance, the Absolute Importance Index (AII) and the Signed Importance Index (SII) whose roles are to identify the most contributing socio-economic factors to the variability of th

SUBMITTER: Foster KL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8334639 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature