THE COVID 19 PANDEMIC: A WAKE-UP CALL FOR SOCIAL CHANGE? A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE US.
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a unique challenge to public health systems and societies around the world. In the United States, COVID -19 has exposed and highlighted existing social vulnerabilities, making what were once hidden issues more visible and pressing. This research paper explores how COVID-19 has exposed and further exacerbated social inequalities in the US, with a focus on how racial disparities and economic disparities have disproportionately affected the people of the US. The paper, through a county-level quantitative spatial analysis, examines the specific incidence of COVID-19 on vulnerable populations highlighting the need for social change. Employing global and local regression models, the paper conducts a spatial analysis to explore three questions in the context of COVID-19– the ‘why’, ‘where’, and ‘how much’. Why do we see the damage to life occur more in one place than the other? Where exactly do we see a more severe impact of the disease? And how much is the difference between these disproportionate impacts?
location than another and how social vulnerabilities associated with poverty, racial minority,
low education, housing cost burden, unemployment, lack of insurance, limited access to
healthy foods and healthcare affected the incidence of COVID-19 across different counties
in the United States along with answering where we see this happening more frequently and
where we see this happening rarely. The quantitative analysis done via regression models
also allows us to quantify the findings in terms of how much, globally, and locally, is the
increase in COVID-19 death rate with each increasing social vulnerability, thus answering
how disproportionate have the devastating impacts of the pandemic been on different
communities.