Analysis of COVID-19 Death Rates Across the Countries of Europe: A Mixed Beta Regression Model

• Activity Number: 386 - SPEED: Statistics in Epidemiology Part 1
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 10, 2022 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Nirajan Bam* and Khalil Shafie H.
• Companies: University of Northern Colorado and University of Northern Colorado
• Keywords: COVID-19; Hospital bed count; Mixed beta regression model; Vaccination rate; Poverty rate

Abstract

Several studies investigated influencing factors of death rate in COVID-19 infectious people, but country-level factors are still debatable. Thus, this study was proposed to investigate the country-level factors of death rates in COVID-19 across the countries of the Europe. Sample of 29190 longitudinal observations of 45 countries of the Europe was used for this analysis. Death rate was continuous and bounded within the interval of 0 and 1. Thus, mixed beta regression model was used to investigate the association between death rates and explanatory variables: time (days), vaccination rate, poverty rate, hospital bed count per 1000, and percentage of the population aged 65 years and older. Finding showed that time, and poverty rate were positively related to death rates, whereas vaccination rate, and percentage of the population aged 65 years and older were negatively related to death rates. Only marginal effect of hospital bed count was statistically significant but subject specific effect was not significant.