What’s the link between internet access and Covid mortality?
A study by the University of Chicago, published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), shows that people in the United States with no internet access, particularly broadband, were more likely to die from Covid-19. A surprising conclusion, and one that could even influence public spending.
Given that the internet has no antiviral effect, nor does it affect our respiratory system, the immediate conclusion would be that internet access reflects other variables such as age, socioeconomic status, level of education, etc. This would explain why mortality is higher among older people, who tend to use the internet less; or among the poor, who are vulnerable because they have to work or cannot afford PPE.
However, the correlation holds when the study introduces these and other related variables as controls, i.e., some other factor related to the availability of an internet connection that is not related to the usual variables used in the study of inequality — socioeconomic status, education level, age, disabilities, rent burden, health insurance coverage or immigration status. In other words, lack of Internet access as a variable that tends to predict inequality is obvious, but that the link to higher death rates is constant even after discounting the effect of these variables is, to say the…
