COVID-19 Pandemic: Marked Global Disparities in Fatalities According to Geographic Location and Universal Health Care

Abstract

Since its outbreak, COVID-19 pandemic has been the biggest global concern with exponentially increasing number of cases and associated deaths across all habitable continents. Various countries around the world with their diverse health care systems, have responded to the pandemic in very distinctive ways. In this paper, we: compared COVID-19 mortality rates across global geographic regions; and assessed differences in COVID-19-related case fatality rate (CFR) based on presence or absence of Universal Health Coverage (UHC). We found that as of May 6, 2020, Europe had experienced the highest CFR globally of 9.6%, followed by 5.9% in North America. Although the pandemic originated in Asia, the continent ranked second to the last in terms of CFR (3.5%). Countries with UHC had lower number of cases of 37.6%, but the CFR of countries with UHC was twice that of countries without UHC (10.5% versus 4.9%). In conclusion, UHC does not appear to protect against mortality in a pandemic environment such as with COVID-19. Key words: • COVID-19 • Global disparity • Universal Health Coverage • Case fatality rate   Copyright © 2020 Dongarwar and Salihu. Published by Global Health and Education Projects, Inc. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.