Geospatial Assessment of COVID-19 Mortality in the Conterminous United States: A socio-economic and underlying health conditions perspective

Keywords: Poverty, COVID-19 Mortality, Underlying Health Conditions
Session Type: Virtual Poster Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 21

Abstract

This study employed global and autoregressive models (SLM and SEM) to assess the influence of poverty, causal fatality rate, vulnerable population, percentage of adults that report no leisure-time physical activity, and percentage of the population with access to places for physical activity on COVID-19 mortality in the contiguous USA. The datasets used in the study were acquired from the Emory University COVID-19 Health Equity Interactive Dashboard sourced from government and non-governmental organizations County health rankings and roadmaps collective initiatives from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. Results show that the adopted models can explain 61% to 81% of COVID-19 mortality across the contiguous USA within the study period. However, MGWR yielded the highest R2 (0.81) and lowest Akaike Information Criterion (AICc) values (4031), emphasizing that it is the most efficient among the adopted regression models. The average adjusted R2 values show that local regression models (R2 = 0.80) outperformed the global regression models (R2= 0.64), indicating that the former is ideal for modeling spatial causal relationships. In addition, COVID-19 mortality exhibited a positive and significant association with black race (0.51), minority (0.48) and poverty (0.34).In contrast, the percentage of persons that attended college was negatively associated with poverty (-0.51), obesity (-0.50) and diabetes (-0.45). Results show that education is crucial to improving Americans' socio-economic and health conditions. We conclude that investing in the people's standard of living would reduce the vulnerability of an entire population.