The European Health Systems Facing the Covid-19 Outbreak: A Macro-Regional Approach

Abstract The article proposes the concept of ‘health macro-region’ as a comprehensive contextual framework for comparative analysis of European health systems beyond the conventional ‘methodological nationalism’ in comparative research based on national analyses. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic in five European health macro-regions is then examined by an analysis of the epidemiological data to assess whether there have been significant differences in the incidence of the pandemic, assuming some structural connections with the responses given by the different health care systems. The significant inter-regional variations detected confirm the heuristic validity of the concept of ‘health macro-region’ but, at the same time, reveal equally significant intra-regional variations highlighted by the coefficients of variation.