Abstract
Objective to analyze the relationship between per capita income and the cumulative incidence of COVID-19 in the neighborhoods of the city of Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil.Method an ecological study using neighborhoods as units of analysis. The cumulative incidence rate per 100,000 inhabitants and the median of potential confounding variables (sex, race, and age) were calculated. Multiple analysis included quantile regression, estimating the regression coefficients of the variable income for every five percentiles from the 10th to 90th percentiles to verify the relationship between income and incidence.Results the city’s rate was 36.58 new cases per 100,000 inhabitants. In general, the highest rates were observed in the wealthiest regions. Multiple analysis was consistent with this observation since the per capita income affected all percentiles analyzed, with a median regression coefficient of 0.02 (p-value <0.001; R2 32.93). That is, there is an increase of R$ 0.02 in the neighborhood’s per capita income for every unit of incidence.Conclusion cumulative incident rates of COVID-19 are influenced by one’s neighborhood of residency, suggesting that access to testing is uneven.
Highlights
With the declaration of the new Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11th, 2020, the escalation of studies addressing potential strategies to cope with the disease has reached a new level[1,2]
The reason is that accumulated theoretical knowledge regarding infectious diseases indicates that there is a potential relationship between per capita income and the incidence of the disease; its spread dynamics are different in European and North American regions, where a significant portion of studies addressing COVID-19 originated[6]
The variables concerning the population structure were collected through the Data Rio application of the IPP, using data from the 2010 Census provided by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics)(16)
Summary
With the declaration of the new Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11th, 2020, the escalation of studies addressing potential strategies to cope with the disease has reached a new level[1,2]. Only measures to intervene in the social structure as a way to reduce the speed at which COVID-19 spreads remain[3]. Much uncertainty remains though regarding the disease’s social dynamics in developing countries and more impoverished regions. The reason is that accumulated theoretical knowledge regarding infectious diseases indicates that there is a potential relationship between per capita income and the incidence of the disease; its spread dynamics are different in European and North American regions, where a significant portion of studies addressing COVID-19 originated[6]. Studies addressing HIV, tuberculosis, and leprosy have already reported this relationship so that it remains to be known how this variable behaves in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, a critical gap so far[7,8,9]
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