Selected determinants and spatial variation of the development of the COVID-19 pandemic – a diagnosis of the first year

Abstract

The COVID pandemic very shortly became the world’s most serious social and economic problem. The paper’s focus is on the spatial aspect of its spread, with the aims being to point to spatial conditioning underpinning development and to identify and assess possible socio-economic features that have been exerting an impact. The authors’ work concern with a relatively large number of countries located in different parts of the world, as well as a quite lengthy time period – linked at least to the COVID-19 pandemic’s second phase of development. The co-occurrence of morbidity index and mortality index, with intentionally selected socio-economic variables has been investigated. The results has been summarized by means of classification of countries regarding both indexes. The basic conclusion is that dependency of pandemic on environmental and socio-economic conditioning is becoming more complex and ambiguous, as well as displaced gradually by a concrete political decisions.