Abstract
Abstract The paper analyses the differences of COVID-19 mortality rates (MR) in 24 European countries. We explain MRs on the available, reliable ex-ante economic, health and social indicators pertaining to the year 2019 – i.e., before the outbreak of the pandemic. Using simple regression equations, we received statistically significant results for 11 such variables out of 28 attempts. Our best model with two ex-ante independent variables explains 0.76 of the variability of our ex-post dependent variable, the logarithm of Cumulative COVID Deaths. The estimated coefficient for the variable Density of Nurses shows that having one more nurse per 1,000 of population decreases cumulative COVID deaths by almost 15%. Similarly, one more unit Consumption of Non-Prescribed Medicine decreases cumulative deaths by 5%. It seems that until now those European countries were successful in minimising the fatalities where the population had a high level of health literacy, people pursue healthier lifestyle and the healthcare systems worked with a relatively large nursing force already prior to the COVID pandemic.
Highlights
We know three things for sure about the pandemic unfolding before our eyes since early 2020, and there is one known unknown factor
We explain mortality rates (MR) on the available, reliable ex-ante economic, health and social indicators pertaining to the year 2019 – i.e., before the outbreak of the pandemic
One more unit Consumption of Non-Prescribed Medicine decreases cumulative deaths by 5%. It seems that until now those European countries were successful in minimising the fatalities where the population had a high level of health literacy, people pursue healthier lifestyle and the healthcare systems worked with a relatively large nursing force already prior to the COVID pandemic
Summary
We know three things for sure about the pandemic unfolding before our eyes since early 2020, and there is one known unknown factor. The present coronavirus pandemic has caused 4–10 million deaths in 18 months, a 0.05% loss of the world’s population This is two orders of magnitude less than the proportion the world experienced during the Spanish flu or the apocalyptical attacks of the bubonic plague bacteria (Table 1, column 5). E.g., the Hungarian public was overwhelmed with the high absolute number of COVID-deaths in Italy and the UK, proportionally the number of fatalities was bigger in Hungary than in the other two countries Not surprisingly, this false perception distorts the thinking horizon of policy experts as well, because they must take into consideration what people think – even if these thoughts are ill-founded. Thousand), Hungary (30 thousand), and in Israel (6,500) signifies massive disparities, given the trivial fact that these three countries are roughly equal in population size
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