Volume 10, Issue 1 (January 2023), Pages: 157-167

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 Original Research Paper

The impact of COVID-19 vaccination coverage on reducing disease burden: A data-driven analysis comparing higher income and lower income countries

 Author(s): Hamid H. Hussien *

 Affiliation(s):

 Department of Mathematics, College of Science and Arts, King Abdulaziz University, Rabigh, Saudi Arabia

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 * Corresponding Author. 

  Corresponding author's ORCID profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5059-181X

 Digital Object Identifier: 

 https://doi.org/10.21833/ijaas.2023.01.020

 Abstract:

COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) vaccination remains a key preventive measure against the current pandemic. As of March 25, 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported 476,374,234 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than six million deaths globally. Our motivation in this study was to examine differences in COVID-19 burden between countries (in terms of incidence and mortality), with the goal of answering whether countries with different income levels have different proportions of fully vaccinated individuals per 100,000 populations, whether this results in differences (on average) in COVID-19-specific incidence, mortality, and vaccination coverage, and whether vaccinations reduce the rate of infections and deaths caused by COVID-19. We performed simple one-way ANOVA (analysis of variance) tests as well as Spearman rank correlation analyses. Our results demonstrated that COVID-19 vaccination rates were low in low-income countries (LICs) and lower-middle-income countries (LMICs), and that the rates of recorded cases and deaths were the lowest in these countries as well (almost certainly due to low surveillance rates). In contrast, COVID-19 vaccination rates were high in high-income countries (HICs) and upper-middle-income countries (UMICs), and these countries also showed the highest rates of recorded cases and deaths. The country-level proportion of people receiving COVID-19 vaccines was statistically significantly and negatively correlated with COVID-19 descriptives in HICs and showed negative weak-to-moderate correlations in lower and middle-income countries. However, there is no proof that this association is causative in nature. Our findings inform research directions, policy initiatives, and medical guidelines.

 © 2022 The Authors. Published by IASE.

 This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

 Keywords: SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, Coronavirus, Vaccine, Income level, High-income countries, Low-income countries

 Article History: Received 4 July 2022, Received in revised form 30 September 2022, Accepted 1 October 2022

 Acknowledgment 

The author expresses his thanks to Dr. Abdelmgid Sidahmed, King Abdulaziz University, College of Science and Arts, Department of Mathematics as well as Dr. Ali Siddig Ahmed, the University of Bisha for their technical support and constructive comments.

 Compliance with ethical standards

 Conflict of interest: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

 Citation:

 Hussien HH (2023). The impact of COVID-19 vaccination coverage on reducing disease burden: A data-driven analysis comparing higher income and lower income countries. International Journal of Advanced and Applied Sciences, 10(1): 157-167

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 Figures

 Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6 Fig. 7 Fig. 8 

 Tables

 Table 1 Table 2 Table 3 Table 4

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