Impact of regional heterogeneity on the severity of COVID-19

The main objective of the study is to assess the impact of regional heterogeneity on the severity of COVID-19 in Japan. We included 27,865 cases registered between January 2020 and February 2021 in the COVID-19 Registry of Japan, to examine the relationship between the National Early Warning Score (NEWS) of COVID-19 patients on the day of admission and the prefecture where the patients live. A hierarchical Bayesian model was used to examine the random effect of each prefecture in addition to the patients’ backgrounds. Additionally, we compared the results of two models; one model included the number of beds secured for COVID-19 patients in each prefecture as one of the fixed effects, and the other model did not. The results indicated that the prefecture had a substantial impact on the severity of COVID-19 on admission, even when considering the effect of the number of beds separately. Our analysis revealed a possible association between regional heterogeneity and increased/decreased risk of severe COVID-19 infection on admission. This heterogeneity was derived not only from the number of beds secured in each prefecture but also from other factors.