When the COVID pandemic struck the world in March of 2020, nation-wide governments were faced by the challenge of constraining the spread of the virus to save their people’s lives as well as their economy. Given that the outbreak was believed to leave enormous scars on the global economy, most countries had to enforce certain restrictions that would maximize the number of lives saved while also minimizing their economic losses.
However, in countries like the United States, finding such balance ended up jeopardizing the lives of many. With over 58% of survey respondents disapproving of the US government's way of handling the pandemic, there seem to be some underlying economic motives behind its decision to reopen the country despite the objective severity of the outbreak. These economic motives may have contributed to the fact that the United States recorded one of the highest total COVID cases per million across the world.
These observations led me to the question: Can we observe a similar global trend in which prioritizing economic motives may correspond to having high numbers of covid cases in a given country?
In order to observe the trend, I have collected data on the total number of covid cases per million in different countries, along with their GDP per capita. Although economic “motives” cannot be directly measured, the GDP per capita is an indicator of a country’s emphasis on their economic performance. It makes sense that countries with high GDPs would simply want to preserve their economic stability. Since there are many other variables that could also account for the high numbers of cases in a country, I decided to expand my analysis by including the stringency index to account for the strictness of a country’s guidelines in response to the pandemic. This index is a composite measure based on nine response indicators including school and workplace closures, travel bans, and lockdowns.
The analysis shows that countries who might have prioritized their economic stability in the midst of a pandemic, were to some statistical degree more likely to have set comparably lenient restrictions, contributing to the spread of the virus and partly leading to higher total numbers of cases per million.