Megaregions and COVID-19: a call for an innovative governing structure in the United States

Abstract

We obtained county-level data for health, socioeconomics, behavior, environment, and healthcare access from the 2020 County Health Rankings dataset. These capture the breadth of SDOH variables used to model COVID-related outcomes. Based on theoretical relationships and underlying statistical correlations, we combined variables into domain-specific indices to enable effective data reduction and avoid multicollinearity issues in our model. For example, county life