Inequality in Health Status During the COVID-19 in the UK: Does the Impact of the Second Lockdown Policy Matter?

Abstract This work uses the models that preserve the ordinal nature of data to measure the overall health inequality in UK regions before and during the pandemic and it adopts the parametric approach to measure the portion of inequalities due to circumstances. The findings show that overall health inequalities decreased within UK regions during the pandemic, while the inequality of health opportunities remains stable in both regions. The health inequality between UK regions was greater in England than in Scotland during the pandemic, while inequalities in health opportunities were greater in Scotland than in England. This work also aims at assessing whether the trends in health inequalities could be related to the different national implementation of the second lockdown policy, also looking at the heterogeneous effect by gender. The findings show that the probability of being in the highest health status categories decreases in England by 15 percentage points for women.