The role of sociodemographic factors during a pandemic outbreak: Aggravators and mitigators

Abstract

Many macro-and micro-level factors affect the spread of an infectious disease. Among them are sociodemographic, socioeconomic, sociocultural, health care system infrastructure, use of alcohol or substances, level of life disruptions because of chronic illnesses. Because of accuracy and timeliness issues, officials are often forced to make one-size-fits-all decisions across all regions. This paper offers a framework to analyze and quantify the interrelationships between a wide set of sociodemographic factors and the transmission speed of the pandemic to facilitate custom-fitted regional containment measures. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of a comprehensive set of sociodemographic factors in the diffusion of COVID-19 analytically. Our findings suggest that diverse sets of sociodemographic factors drive the transmission during different stages of the pandemic. In specific, we show that variables such as gender, age groups, daily commuting distances, modes of employment, poverty and transportation means are found to be statistically significant in the transmission speed of COVID-19. Our results do not suggest a statistically significant relationship between transmission speed and migration-related variables. We also find that the importance levels for the statistically significant variables vary across different stages of the pandemic. Our results point out a variety of public policy insights and implications.