Effect of Universal TB Vaccination and Other Policy-Relevant Factors on the Probability of Patient Death from COVID-19

Amos Golan, Tinatin Mumladze, Danielle Wilson, Elissa Cohen, Troy McGuinness, William Mooney and Jisung Moon

No 2020-041, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: The possibility of reoccurring waves of the novel coronavirus that triggered the 2020 pandemic makes it critical to identify underlying policy-relevant factors that could be leveraged to decrease future COVID-19 death rates. We examined variation in a number of underlying, policy- relevant, country-level factors and COVID-19 death rates across countries. We found three such factors that significantly impact the survival probability of patients infected with COVID-19. In order of impact, these are universal TB (BCG) vaccination, air pollination deaths, and a health-related expenditure. We quantify each probability change by age and sex. To deal with small sample size and high correlations, we use an information-theoretic inferential method that also allows us to introduce priors constructed from independent SARS data.

Keywords: BCG vaccine; coronavirus; COVID-19; health expenditure; inference; information theory; policy; pollution level (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 I14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Note: MIP
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Golan- ... _Policies_Report.pdf First Version, May 22, 2020 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hka:wpaper:2020-041

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jennifer Pachon (humcap@uchicago.edu).