Correlation between environmental factors and COVID-19 indices: a global level ecological study

Abstract

This global level ecological study aimed to investigate the correlation between environmental factors and the COVID-19 indices. This survey is an ecological study, so all studied variables are aggregate variables. To collect the variables in the study, a data set was provided, which includes the information of each country based on the cumulative deaths, case fatality rate, recovery rate, and the number of performed COVID-19 tests. Scatter plots of environmental factors for the studied countries were drawn based on cumulative incidence rate of cases, cumulative incidence rate of death, tests, recovery rate, and case fatality rate of COVID-19. Furthermore, Spearman correlation coefficient was also used to verify the correlation between environmental factors and indicators related to COVID-19. The results of this ecological study showed that among all countries surveyed, Montenegro (60,310.56 per million) and Luxembourg (54,807.89 per million) had the highest cumulative incidence rates of COVID-19 cases, when Tanzania (8.42 per million) and Vietnam (13.78 per million) had the lowest cumulative incidence rates of COVID-19. In addition, in this study, it was shown that the cumulative incidence rate of cases, the cumulative incidence rate of deaths, and performed COVID-19 tests had significant direct correlations with the access to drinking water and the access to sanitation services (p < 0.001). The findings of the present study showed an inverse correlation between the mortality rate due to unhealthy water consumption, poor health status, and a positive correlation between access to drinking water and health services with the cumulative incidence and mortality rates of COVID-19. The differences between our findings and many other studies could be due to the ecological nature of the study. Nevertheless, our findings will help health policymakers to develop timely strategies to reduce the mortality and incidence rate of COVID-19.

Correlation between human development index and its components with COVID-19 indices: a global level ecologic study

“…Ecological studies have a history of use in public health issues and diseases [ 39 , 40 ]. In this study, limitations related to the method used must be considered and the results must be carefully interpreted as there may be an ecological fallacy.…”

Feature Analysis and Machine Learning Techniques to determine severity of COVID-19 infections

“…Because the data were collected in the first months of the pandemic, seasonal behaviour of COVID-19 could not be observed [21][22][23][24] and is not represented in the data. To avoid overfitting due to coincidental correlations between time features and the resulting outcome, all time features were removed.…”

“…Possible extensions of this work could be done by repeating the experiments with more data collected over a longer time period or different locations. This might result in a more representative evaluation of the actual importance of time features as SARS-CoV-2 seems to be correlated to seasonal behaviour, but also regarding environmental influences and accessibility of health institutions [21][22][23][24]. Additionally aspects like SARS-CoV-2 mutations, times of vaccination and date of last vaccination could be included and improve the reliability of the model by now.…”

Examining the world’s countries in terms of outbreak, control, and vaccination against COVID-19

“…The chaos caused by COVID-19 has affected personal and group life in different societies as well as the national and global performances. The economic, social, educational, environmental, and other functional indices changed considerably [2,3]. COVID-19 pandemic incurred massive damages to human societies, such that from the beginning of its outbreak up to 20 January 2022, 336,790,193 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with 5,560,718 deaths have been reported to WHO.…”

“…In studies performed on controlling COVID-19, so far healthcare and medical geography, as well as healthcare and medical policies have remained understudied [15]. Considering the rapid and extensive spread of this disease through the air and the inevitable interactions among different societies especially in neighboring countries, as well as genetic, cultural, social and other similarities of these counties, extraterritorial and international communications, as well as inability of some countries in providing the resources required for tackling this disease, global approaches are essential for controlling COVID-19 [3,16,17]. The past experiences of different counties indicated that local decisions on confronting this disease can influence the global community.…”