Abstract
Background:Disease control involves multiple actions overtime to halt the spread of COVID-19. The role of a country’s governance in slowing the spread of COVID-19 has not yet been well investigated.Objective:This study aims to investigate the association between governance and the trend of COVID-19 incidence in countries with the highest prevalence. We hypothesized that countries with better governance are more likely to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 than countries with worse governance.Methods:We analyzed 62 most prevalent countries with at least 10,000 accumulative confirmed cases from January 22 to June 15, 2020. Countries were further grouped into three different levels of governance (25 better governance, 24 fair governance, and 13 worse governance), identified outbreak and mitigation periods using the joinpoint regression model, and compared the number of days and average daily percent change in incidence in two periods by governance level using the one-way analysis of variance.Findings:The average outbreak period in the 62 countries lasted 84.0 days. Sixty percent of countries (N = 37) had experienced outbreak periods, followed by a mitigation period. In contrast, the rest forty percent of countries (N = 25) still had a rising trend. In the outbreak period, better governance countries had a more rapid increase but a shorter outbreak period (71.2 days) than countries with fair (93.5 days) and worse (90.8 days) governance. Most countries with better governance (84.0%) revealed a declining trend in COVID-19 incidence, while such a trend was less than half of fair and worse governance countries (38.5%–41.7%).Conclusions:Countries with better governance are more resilient during the COVID-19 crisis. While the mitigation of COVID-19 is observed in most better governance countries, the incidence of COVID-19 is still surging in most fair and worse governance countries, and the possibility of a recurring epidemic of COVID-19 in countries cannot be ignored.
Highlights
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been spreading globally for more than five months, since the WorldHealth Organization officially and systematically began reporting the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in January 2020 [1]
[9], and countries with lower scores of political stability and absence of violence were associated with higher inequality in the coverage of health interventions in the study of 80 low- and middle-income countries [10]. Using this data set of governance indicators, we found that governance is just as important as disease control measures in reducing a country’s child mortality [11]
We found that countries with better governance had a more rapid increase but a shorter outbreak period than countries with fair or worse governance by 19.6–22.3 days
Summary
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been spreading globally for more than five months, since the WorldHealth Organization officially and systematically began reporting the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in January 2020 [1]. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been spreading globally for more than five months, since the World. distancing, and staying in lockdown) have been a predominant theme in recent global scientific research to prevent further spreading of COVID-19. Governance represents the characteristics by which a country manages its authority [6]. It covers the process of selecting, monitoring, and replacing governments, the Nevada, Las Vegas, School of Public Health, Las Vegas, NV, US. Disease control involves multiple actions overtime to halt the spread of COVID-19. The role of a country’s governance in slowing the spread of COVID-19 has not yet been well investigated
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