Letter to the Editor
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2021. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Clin Infect Dis. Apr 25, 2021; 11(2): 35-37
Published online Apr 25, 2021. doi: 10.5495/wjcid.v11.i2.35
COVID-19 mortality and gross domestic product loss: A wake-up call for government leaders
Atsushi Sakuraba, Toshiro Sato
Atsushi Sakuraba, Department of Medicine, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, United States
Toshiro Sato, Department of Organoid Medicine, Keio University School of Medicine, Tokyo 108-8345, Japan
Author contributions: Sakuraba A contributed to the conceptualization, methodology, and writing; Sato T edited and approved the final draft.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All authors have no conflicts of interest directly relevant to the content of this article.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Atsushi Sakuraba, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, University of Chicago, 5841 S Maryland Ave, Chicago, IL 60637, United States. asakurab@medicine.bsd.uchicago.edu
Received: February 17, 2021
Peer-review started: February 17, 2021
First decision: March 17, 2021
Revised: March 30, 2021
Accepted: April 8, 2021
Article in press: April 8, 2021
Published online: April 25, 2021
Processing time: 65 Days and 1.4 Hours
Core Tip

Core Tip: There is a large variation of mortality and damage to economy due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) among countries. In the present study, we demonstrated that there was a negative correlation between gross domestic product (GDP) and COVID-19 mortality suggesting that countries that failed to control the virus would see a larger decline in GDP. Some countries or regions (China, New Zealand, and Taiwan) have acted quickly and aggressively to prevent the spread of COVID-19, which resulted in relatively small damage to the economy. Governmental leaders should act fast and aggressively when making decisions because data shows that countries who have run after two hares have caught neither.