Social and economic variables explain COVID-19 diffusion in European regions

At the beginning of 2020, Italy was the country with the highest number of COVID-19 cases, not only in Europe, but also in the rest of the world, and Lombardy was the most heavily hit region of Italy. The objective of this research is to understand which variables have determined the prevalence of c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2024-03, Vol.14 (1), p.6142-6142, Article 6142
Main Authors: Cancedda, Christian, Cappellato, Alessio, Maninchedda, Luigi, Meacci, Leonardo, Peracchi, Sofia, Salerni, Claudia, Baralis, Elena, Giobergia, Flavio, Ceri, Stefano
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/705/1046
692/499
COVID-19
COVID-19 - epidemiology
Education
Europe - epidemiology
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
Italy - epidemiology
Life expectancy
Life span
multidisciplinary
Pandemics
SARS-CoV-2
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
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Summary:At the beginning of 2020, Italy was the country with the highest number of COVID-19 cases, not only in Europe, but also in the rest of the world, and Lombardy was the most heavily hit region of Italy. The objective of this research is to understand which variables have determined the prevalence of cases in Lombardy and in other highly-affected European regions. We consider the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, using a set of 22 variables related to economy, population, healthcare and education. Regions with a high prevalence of cases are extracted by means of binary classifiers, then the most relevant variables for the classification are determined, and the robustness of the analysis is assessed. Our results show that the most meaningful features to identify high-prevalence regions include high number of hours spent in work environments, high life expectancy, and low number of people leaving from education and neither employed nor educated or trained.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-024-56267-z