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The Annals of Regional Science

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25-01-2022 | Special Issue Paper

Regional poverty and infection disease: early exploratory evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

Authors: Abu Bakkar Siddique, Kingsley E. Haynes, Rajendra Kulkarni, Meng-Hao Li

Published in: The Annals of Regional Science | Issue 1/2023

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Abstract

This paper examines the role of regional poverty on the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA. It also explores how the effects differ with the concentration of ethnic minorities. We find that poverty is a significant and consistent determinant of higher COVID-19 infections and fatalities. Prevalent poverty areas experienced higher infections due to economic structure that require hypermobility (high mobility and interpersonal interaction)—more physical human to human contact resulting in higher deaths from limited access to health services. These are also regions where minority groups are concentrated. Disproportionate infections and fatalities occurred within the black, Hispanic, and Asian population. Our evidence is robust to state fixed effects that capture local COVID-19 mitigation policies, multi-level hierarchical modeling, spatial autoregressive assessment, and large sets of county-level health, social, and economic factors. This paper contributes to the literature on health and economic disparities and their resulting consequences for infectious diseases.

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See Brodeur et al. (2020) for a review of these literature.

These people can be covered through public services such as Medicaid. It is the people who have low income, certain immigrants, and those who do not meet special state determined characteristics who are not eligible for Medicaid. It is this population and those who are close to or right above the poverty line that have the most coverage problems.

An alternative measure of positivity rate could have solved this issue partially; however, we did not utilize it since positivity rate data at the county level were incomplete and could have generated additional problems.

Details of the ranking process and weighting factors are available in the CHR&R website at https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/explore-health-rankings/measures-data-sources.

Generally, if the VIF is more than 10, it is considered a matter of concern and none of our variables has a 10 or higher VIF score. However, we acknowledge that VIF for poverty (7.91) and median income (9.8). It is because poverty and median income are negatively correlated. To confirm whether this negative correlation is a problem for our estimates, we tried to verify in several ways, we are mentioning two of them here: First, we run Generalized Ridge Regression which is a technique for analyzing multiple regression data that may suffer from multicollinearity. The selected Ridge k Value = 0.008 which is a very small penalty to the efficiency of the model but corrects the multicollinearity problems. We confirm that this Ridge regression produced very identical results compared to what we reported Table 2. Since Ridge regression does not allow the State FE model, we stick to our original choice of the model. Second, we also rerun the model after dropping the median income and that gave us lower VIF for all variables (less than 5), but our results/conclusion of the paper remain unchanged.

See Otani et al. (2019) for details of this modeling.

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Title: Regional poverty and infection disease: early exploratory evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic
Authors: Abu Bakkar Siddique
Kingsley E. Haynes
Rajendra Kulkarni
Meng-Hao Li
Publication date: 25-01-2022
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published in: The Annals of Regional Science / Issue 1/2023
Print ISSN: 0570-1864
Electronic ISSN: 1432-0592
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-022-01109-x

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