“Long GFC”? The global financial crisis, health care, and COVID-19 deaths

Do financial crises affect long-term public health? To answer this question, we examined the relationship between the 2007–2009 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the 2020–2022 COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we examined the relationship between the financial losses derived from the GFC, and the health outcomes associated with the first wave of the pandemic. European countries that were more affected by the financial crisis had more deaths relative to coronavirus cases. An analogous relationship emerged across Spanish provinces and US states. Part of the transmission from finances to health outcomes appears to have occurred through cross-sectional differences in health care facilities.