E2022003                                                          2022-03-23

Dandan Zhang

Xiao Liu

Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic may have amplified the effects of inequality in terms

10 of the death rates among low socioeconomic groups. By using data on 1,502 COVID-19 patients who were admitted to a designated hospital in Wuhan during the city’s COVID-19 pandemic, this paper investigates whether patients’ socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with COVID-19 mortality and how the effect varies under different levels of medical resource scarcity. Our estimation results show that lower-SES patients had 15 higher fatality rates during the “hospital run” period, which were mainly driven by delayed hospital admission, reduced treatment intensity, and limited access to scarce

medical treatment and medicine to deal with COVID-19. However, such inequality ceased to exist when “inclusive healthcare”was implemented later in the pandemic. The findings suggest that rapidly increasing hospital capacity and medical supply is an 20 effective strategy to tackle inequalities in health outcomes during a pandemic.

Keywords: inequality, fatality rate, medical resources, socioeconomic status, COVID-25 19
 

JEL Classification: J18, I14

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