Explaining COVID-19 mortality rates in the first wave in Europe

The beta regression has been received considerable attention in the last decade because of its applications to proportional data in several fields. We study the variability of coronavirus death rates in the first wave of twenty European countries using the beta regression with two systematic components for the mean and dispersion parameters. We prove empirically that the population density, proportion of urban population, hospital beds per 100 thousand and running time explain the variability of the COVID-19 death rates in the first wave of these countries.