Age at migration and resilience to health shocks

Resilience to health-related shocks is crucial for both individual and societal well-being and influences health disparities between different groups. Each year, there is a risk that entirely new diseases may emerge, for example through animal-to-human transmission, where the population lacks immunity. In the worst case, such situations can lead to pandemics. To design relevant measures—both in the short and long term—we need to understand the factors behind differences in how severely various groups are affected.

To reduce the risk that future health crises impact different groups unevenly, we need as direct knowledge as possible about the causes behind these disparities. In this project, we use extensive Swedish register data to investigate several potential explanatory mechanisms for the link between migration background and negative health outcomes during the pandemic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, experiences from several countries showed that many migrant groups were particularly hard hit. This pattern contrasts somewhat with the more varied picture that research otherwise provides regarding general health differences between foreign-born and native-born individuals.
Our data show that the pandemic’s effects followed a clear gradient: foreign-born adults who spent a larger part of their childhood in Sweden had a lower likelihood of being hospitalized due to COVID-19. This result points to a close connection between exposure to Swedish society during childhood and vulnerability in a health crisis.

Reseachers

Erik Grönqvist

Tram Pham

Oskar Nordström Skans

Olof Åslund