1 INTRODUCTION

There are pieces of evidence indicating that the pandemic- and epidemic- related mortalities can vary considerably among different countries and populations. Genetic profile, age, sex, and immunological signature are among the essential factors that affect mortality rate in a disease outbreak (Luk, Gross, & Thompson, 2001; Shanks, Wilson, Kippen, & Brundage, 2018; Wu et al., 2018). Such a variation also occurs ‎in the demographically similar groups in which measures of the health systems, type of the quarantine approach, thoroughness of enforcement (Crosby, 2003; Dennis Shanks et al., 2010; McLeod et al., 2008; Shanks et al., 2018), as well as social and economic contexts of a particular society (Curtis, 2004) are the critical determinants of the mortality rate. In any pandemic and epidemic, knowing about these determinants can help to take a more efficient control of the disease and reduce the unwanted disease burden; this is more critical in the case of new emerging pandemics and epidemics such as the recently emerged COVID-19.
From the first report of infection on December 31, 2019 in Wuhan City, Hubei province in China until the time of this writing (April 25, 2020), 210 countries and territories around the world and two international conveyances are affected by the Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Earlier on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the new COVID-19 is the latest pandemic of the world (Cucinotta & Vanelli, 2020; Stoffel et al., 2020). Until now, based on the first published reports on the epidemiological factors and mortality rates of the COVID-19 outbreak, it is evident that, like many other pandemics, the COVID-19 mortality also varies noticeably among different nations around the world (Grech, 2020; Lai et al., 2020; Q. Ruan, Yang, Wang, Jiang, & Song, 2020; Shojaee et al., 2020; Sun, Qiu, Huang, & Yang, 2020). As a noteworthy variation, we can mention the difference in the total confirmed death rate between the U.S., some European countries (e.g., Italy, Spain, France, and the U.K.), and the Middle East.
The Middle East, known as an oil-rich region, consists of about 17 countries located at the confluence of three continents (i.e., Asia, Africa, and Europe). This region has its specific cultural behavior and economic context, quite different from the U.S. and the Europian countries. Most of the people living in this region are Muslim, although Jew and Christians have also a noticeable population. Ethnic diversity is another noticeable catachrestic of this region, as well, where Arabs, Persians, Turks, and Kurds are the most populous inhabitants. Talking about these differences is not the topic of this writing, although some details can be found in the following references (Badr, Abdallah, & Mahmoud, 2005; Inhorn, Birenbaum-Carmeli, Tremayne, & Gürtin, 2017; Latzman et al., 2015; Madadin, 2015; Ourfali, 2015; Van Horne, Belkacem, & Al Fusail, 2013). As stated before, all these differences can affect the epidemiological features of any outbreak. Hence, it seems that in the new emerging COVID-19 pandemic, a comparison of the disease-related mortality rate between the Middle East region and the top ten most affected countries (the U.S., Spain, Italy, France, Germany, the U.K., Turkey, Iran, China, and Russia) can provide some helpful information. Moreover, it is deemed that the new pandemic has the potential to affect the geopolitical dynamics, which, in the case of the Middle East, is of a global concern (Woertz, 2020). At the time of this writing (April 25, 2020), Iran and Turkey were the only Middle East countries that were placed in the top ten most affected list. With this introduction, in the present study, we aimed to compare the COVID-19 mortality rates between the Middle East and top ten most affected countries using mortality-related epidemiolocal terms along with a comprehensive literature analysis.