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Hospital beds & restraining individual rights may be the key to reducing coronavirus mortality rates
By Kent R. Kroeger (April 15, 2020)
Key Takeaways: At this point in the 2009–2010 coronavirus pandemic (9 April), the country-level variable that most strongly correlates with the incidence rate of coronavirus-related deaths is the number of hospital beds relative to population size.
Curiously, or perhaps not, there is also tentative evidence that countries with the most political freedom are experiencing higher numbers of coronavirus-related deaths per 1 million people, all else equal.
This could be a function of such countries having a harder time implementing restrictive, yet effective, mitigation and suppression policies — such as travel bans, stay-at-home orders, and business closures — due to public resistance, or…
…it could be because countries with political freedom are aided by law, economic means and/or cultural norms to be more forthcoming with accurate mortality figures.
And, of course, both statements could be true.
Accurate record keeping on deaths will be critical to our understanding of the coronavirus pandemic of 2009–2010. It is, somewhat sadly, a record keeping function governments do fairly well.
