Spatiotemporal pattern of COVID-19 mortality and its relationship with socioeconomic and environmental factors in England

This paper investigated the spatiotemporal pattern of COVID-19 mortality and its socioeconomic and environmental determinants in the first and second wave of the pandemic in England. The COVID-19 mortality rates for middle super output areas from March 2020 to April 2021 were used in the analysis. SaTScan was used in the analysis of spatiotemporal pattern of COVID-19 mortality and geographically weighted Poisson regression (GWPR) was used to investigate the association with socioeconomic and environmental factors. The results show that there was significant spatiotemporal variation in hotspots of COVID-19 deaths with the hotspots moving from regions where the COVID-19 outbreak initiated and then spread to other parts of the country. The GWPR analysis revealed that age composition, ethnic composition, deprivation, care home and pollution were all related to COVID-19 mortality. Althoughthe relationship varied over space the association with these factors was fairly consistent over the first and second wave.