THE ROLE OF SOCIAL CONNECTEDNESS IN THE CORONAVIRUS DISEASE (COVID-19) PANDEMIC OUTCOME

Abstract

The magnitude of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has an enormous impact on the social life and the economic activities in almost every country in the world. Besides the biological and epidemiological factors, a multitude of social and economic criteria also govern the extent of the coronavirus disease spread in the population. Consequently, there is an active debate regarding the critical socio-economic factors that contribute to the resulting pandemic. In this paper, we contribute towards the resolution of the debate by examining the role of an individual’s social connectedness in the extent to which the coronavirus spread. To measure social connectedness we create a network in which nodes represent countries and the interactions between pairs of countries are given by the number of shared Facebook contacts, whereas the coronavirus outcome is simply quantified as the number of registered cases per million population in the country. We find that there exists a robust and stable relationship between the level social importance of a country as well as the degree to which its people mix, and the outcome of the coronavirus health crisis. Countries which take a more central role in the network of social connections are also more susceptible to the coronavirus, whereas countries where there is less social mixing are less affected by the induced disease. Our results are an empirical verification for standard theories, which suggest that social network structures play a critical role in disease spreading processes. More importantly, they serve as a validation that social distancing measures introduced by governments are essential policies for preventing a fatal coronavirus outcome, and can be implemented for developing appropriate social distancing measures.