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Many papers have investigated the effects of Covid-19 on people's well-being shortly after the epidemic's outbreak. In this article, we use the joint World Values Survey (WVS) and European Value Study (EVS) 2017-2022 dataset and employ OLS (Ordinary Least Squares) regressions and Coarsened Exact Matching, to evaluate the possible existence of a persistent effect on life satisfaction, two years after the start of the pandemic. We have chosen to focus on the Netherlands -a country which appears among the happiest in the world and for which we have available data- to assess the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic at this later stage. The results of our analysis seem to indicate that the pandemic has contributed to reducing the levels of life satisfaction significantly, particularly among the younger generation. These findings show that specific intervention programmes should be created focusing on different age groups.
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Introduction: Many researchers have focused their studies on hypertension due to its over-representation among COVID-19 patients. Both retrospective and observational studies conducted close to the Wuhan area have reported that hypertension is the most common comorbidity observed in patients affected by COVID-19. Objective: Our objective is that patients with arterial hypertension have a worse prognosis in terms of evolution leading to higher costs. Methods: A retrospective cross-sectional study was conducted. A total of 3,581 patients from La Paz University Hospital (LPUH) during the period between 15 July 2020 and 31 July 2020 were included in this study. Results: It should be noted that 40.71% of the patients were hypertensive. As expected, hypertension was associated with men, among whom we observed a higher prevalence and a higher age (median age of 77 years (IQI: 65-85) versus 52 years (IQI: 37-64), p-value < 0.001). Hypertensive patients had a higher prevalence of dyspnea (52.14% vs. 47.15%, p-value = 0.004) and altered awareness (14.89% vs. 4.30%, p-value <0.001). The non-parametric Kaplan-Meier curve estimates the survival of patients in the two study groups. We can see how patients with hypertension have a higher associated mortality, with the difference being statistically significant, p-value (log-rank) = 0.004. Only for the appearance of complications during hospitalization, the group of hypertensive patients reached the figure of 1,355,901.71 compared to the total of 421,403.48 for normotensive patients. Conclusion: Our study shows the worse clinical evolution of patients with COVID-19 in terms of associated morbidity and mortality. It also shows that the cost of managing patients with hypertension is greater than that of managing normotensive patients.
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COVID-19 , Hipertensión , Anciano , Humanos , Masculino , Persona de Mediana Edad , COVID-19/epidemiología , Estudios Transversales , Atención a la Salud , Hipertensión/epidemiología , Estudios Retrospectivos , Adulto , Anciano de 80 o más Años , FemeninoRESUMEN
This paper expands the analysis of the cyclical characteristics of social spending by providing information on its joint behaviour across OECD countries. With this aim we propose the use of dynamic factor analysis and recursive models to estimate synchronization and cyclicality of social policies within a broad perspective. By considering the synchronization of social spending it is possible to assess the short-run characteristics of the joint response to changes in the economic cycle. We find that synchronization of social spending was only possible for advanced economies, achieving the highest countercyclical stabilization effect during the Global Financial Crisis. Emerging market economies are not able to join the synchronized response, maintaining independent and, in most cases, procyclical stances in the behaviour of their social policies. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10663-022-09545-w.
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Spain has become one of the countries most affected by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), with the highest testing rates, and one of the worst-performing countries in the fight against the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic. There are no studies related to the consumption of health resources and the economic cost of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We present a retrospective analysis of 9,811 (Primary Care and Hospital) patients which aimed to estimate public health expenditure by the consumption of health resources due to COVID-19. According to the results, the gender distribution of patients has a similar rate in both groups, with slightly higher rates in women. Similarly, age is the same in both groups, with a median of 62 years in the case of hospitalizations and 61 years in the case of primary care; using a weighted average of these rates and costs, we can estimate that the average cost of care per patient infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, regardless of the course is 2373.24. We conclude that a patient with COVID-19 without hospitalization costs 729.79, while the expenses of a hospitalized patient are between 4294.36 and 14440.68, if there is ICU admission.