The effect of social inequality on the growth of COVID-19 death case

Abstract

World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 has become a pandemic on March 11 2020, and counted as a dangerous disease including in Indonesia since it is causing immune drop after an infection that could emerge other diseases. Therefore, many people, both poor or wealthy, are worried. We formulate a modified Susceptible Infected Recovered compartmental model (SIR), where the Infected compartment could be dead because of the disease. Assuming that the poor have less access to excellent health facilities, this population is more likely to have more diseases that can recur after being infected with COVID-19. From pandemic history, life expectancy and death rates are disproportionate between the wealthiest and most deprived populations. It is based on previous pandemic cases that the life expectancy and death rates between the wealthy and poor communities are excessive. We show the effect of social inequality on the growth of the COVID-19 death case using the SIR model for the COVID-19 outbreak considering that the reinfection of COVID-19 could happen in some cases knowing that immune could be waning between people that got recovered from the virus. By numerical calculations and illustrating it in the graph, the results show that cases with high social inequality tend to have higher death rates and cases with low social inequality levels tend to have lower death rates. Thus, social inequality could affect the death rate caused by COVID-19 cases.