How Does Covid-19 Affect Healthcare Economically

Abstract
This paper discusses the economic effect of COVID-19 on healthcare. It shows that COVID-19 had caused much damage in both the health and economic sectors. As of March 28, 2020, the disease had contributed to the loss of 10 million jobs, and this data was for just two weeks. The damage that had happened before the two weeks was not captured in this duration. During the second quarter, the United States economy will shrink by 10% to 25%. The economy's slow growth is already happening in the USA, with main economic activities being affected. Economy damage is occurring worldwide, with the health sector being the most hit. Financial markets that depend on other sectors, including health, are also losing huge profits daily. All these damages put together are expected to cause a loss of approximately $1 trillion in the world economy by the end of the year 2020. This recession's effect onthe economy is being felt in the transport industry, manufacturing industries, with many people losing jobs primarily due to measures to contain the pandemic. At the initial stage of Covid-19, many countries underestimated the danger ahead and thought everything would be fixed in a few days. The economy was to remain stable, but things are turning out very differently. Both lives and economies must be supported to avoid total damage. What is even more discouraging is reports showing that the disease is here to stay, and so the world should come up with measures to live with the condition until that day when a vaccine will be found.
The paper concludes that he United States government is responsible for how it prepares for handling such crises. The US government has to do more to handle these crises with a view that goes beyond the virus itself. There can be much more significant adverse health effects from lockdowns and the government has to consider this in the future.
Introduction
COVID-19 has affected healthcare economically."A pandemic's effect is viewed in terms of both mortality andits effect on people's livelihood. The world has spent billions of dollars fighting against the pandemic, and people have lost jobs as nations have gone into lockdown mode. Advocates of lockdowns—like Bill and Melinda Gates and Dr. Fauci—have come across as unaware of or indifferent to the health effects of lockdowns. Suicide rates have spiked; people have not been able to get proper access to care for other medical issues. Depression and other mental health concerns have risen dramatically. Starvation has occurred in the developing world because of supply chains breaking down. Yet all Dr. Fauci and the Gates family can do is look at the very small percentage of the population that might die from COVID. Doctors have been vocal about the insanity of politics meddling in science, yet governments continue to act as though they wanted to see the world shut down. Demand and supply chains have destabilized, and investors can no longer trust the market dynamics. Significant changes have happened in different sectors to prevent and streamline the pandemic’s response (Shrestha et al., 2020). The hard-hit countries such as the USA, Europe, and China contribute heavily to the world economy. Countries like China lead in manufacturing and their slowdown is felt globally. Going slow on production directly affects the supply chain, and trade depends on demand and supply to keep going (Lenzen et al., 2020). Some hospitals are also experiencing a financial crisis, and paying their health workers has become an issue. Health care workers are being laid off; businesses are closing. Such challenges may prompt health workers to withdraw their services at this critical time. The United States should have programs to support health sectors in the United States and globally and more so in developing countries (Blumenthal, Fowler, Abrams & Collins, 2020). Scripture provides a good reminder on how governments should embrace the Golden Rule at times like these and return to Christ: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30). Human governments are always going to have limitations in terms of what they can do. Yet God can do a great deal more—but unfortunately God is too often a last resort for people. This paper will describe the problems of the COVID hysteria and what the government could do better to adopt a Christian orientation to the problem to make it better instead of worse.
Background
The main problem with the COVID-19 response is that it has been so narrow and short-sighted. It has been a response made in panic and then made into policy by governmental bureaucrats. Health care should not be something that the government meddles in. Governor Andrew Cuomo won an Emmy for his role in managing the pandemic in New York. But this is not a TV show—this is real life and Cuomo has no business dictating to others so that hospitals, which are designed to reach 200% capacity if need be, do not hit the “danger zone” of 95% capacity in the ICU. Health care is a business and it does not pay to have empty ICUs, so running at 95% capacity is normal and healthy for a hospital. Cuomo is misleading the public about this fact and acting like the hospitals are in danger of being overwhelmed. That is simply not true. The entire reaction to COVID is one that has been politicized to no end, and the health effects of this politicization are monstrous. It impacts communities and the way they deal with stress. Many people, for instance, have turned to self-medicating to alleviate their stress and that is leading to a rise in substance abuse. The black market economy is springing back up as a result of this as well—and that can be seen in the new Silk Road.
Cutler (2020) explains that the economic and healthcare crisis the COVID-19 pandemic created will lead to a 10% to 25% contraction of the US economy. What this means is that the United States has essentially entered a COVID-19 recession. The pandemic’s economic effect is attributed to the federal government’s failure to provide adequate testing facilities in Cutler’s (2020) eyes—but testing for COVID has been criticized by doctors and clinicians because the testing itself has been politicized.
The Role of Clinicians
Clinicians do not clinically diagnose anyone with an illness unless that person has symptoms. Asymptomatic people should not be tested for anything. Even the designer of the PCR test used for testing for COVID has stated that it should not be used for these purposes. It is completely absurd that health care professionals are counting “cases” of asymptomatic people who tested positive for coronavirus as though this were the same thing as having COVID. COVID is the disease; coronavirus is just a virus—and it is not going to affect everyone the same way. The alarm bells going off just because not enough testing is being done is ludicrous as it implies that testing positive for coronavirus is the same as being diagnosed with COVID. Cutler’s (2020) argument that a health care crisis is unfolding because of a contracting US economy is correct. That is happening. But the argument that it is all because not enough testing was done initially is absurd. Clinicians do not conduct tests unless there are symptoms showing indicating the person might have a disease. One cannot be clinically diagnosed with a disease if there are no symptoms. The idea of asymptomatic people being super spreaders is equally ludicrous. Coronavirus has completely been blown out of proportion to what it actually is—that is what is responsible for the coming recession: the unfounded panic—not any lack of testing.
The effects of this panic are impacting the economy in enormous ways, and Pak et al. (2020) also point this out. They highlight the significant reduction in income, unemployment rise, disruptions in industrial operation, and service rendering due to the measures employed to deal with the pandemic in various countries. But again they make the same illogical conclusion as Cutler (2020)—that better preparedness is needed to prevent such economic disruptions. That is not at all what is needed. What is needed is better common sense and for politics to stay out of medicine. COVID is not a pandemic—plain and simple. A very small percentage of the population has been diagnosed with having COVID. More people are suffering from obesity or dying from congestive heart failure than from COVID—but no one sees Dr. Fauci sounding the alarms to lock down the economy or close all the fast food restaurants and ban soda from being sold. The reaction to coronavirus has been entirely devoid of common sense because it has been dictated by politicians in conjunction with hysteria whipped up by media outlets. The effect on health strictly from the standpoint of how this hysteria is impacting the economy will be catastrophic for years to come.
Effects Worldwide
Kabir, Afzal, Khan and Ahmed (2020) predict the reaction to coronavirus will lead to 1 trillion dollars in costs in 2020, producing a greater financial impact than that of the world’s Great Financial Crisis in 2007-2008. Brodeur, Gray, Islam and Bhuiyan (2020) have predicted the same. The pandemic’s economic cost has so affected many nations that some nations are cutting interest rates and revising expenditures to mitigate the effect.
This can mean a severing of the donations some countries give to support some United Nations programs, which will lead to food shortages in developing worlds and thus more sickness, death, malnutrition and disease. Such profound adverse health effects are not being talked about by Dr. Fauci or the Gates Foundation, yet media outlets routinely tout these individuals as experts whose opinions should be trusted.
The world needs to trust in God more than in the so-called experts. That is the big takeaway that needs to be reminded here. Too much trust is put in bureaucrats instead of in common sense and faith.
Other Parts of the World
Unfortunately, the US appears to be setting the tone for the entire world, so the impact of these so-called experts is quite far reaching. Gopalan and Misra (2020) for example examine the pandemic's economic effect on the socio-economic status of India, with a particular focus on the economic downturn of the lower stratum. The statement of the World Economic Forum describes the condition of migrants stuck abroad and the measures such migrants adopt to cope with the situation. This includes the engagement of low wage jobs, the acceptance of poor working conditions, and a restriction on spending, increasing the risk of exposure to diseases such as the coronavirus (Gopalan & Misra, 2020). Of course the important point is that the economic impact of lockdowns is far more detrimental than the expert leaders in the US bureaucracy are willing to admit. The exposure to coronavirus should not even be a serious health concern—but the bureaucrats in DC and their propaganda agents in the media have made it so.
Other parts of the world have also been affected and so too have migrant workers. The urban lockdowns imposed by the world's governments in response to the COVID-19 outbreak have led to job losses and economic difficulty for migrant workers (Lambert et al., 2020). There has been a global decline in the remittances which support millions in low-income countries. The economic significance of the remittances is best exemplified with sub-Saharan Africa, which received an inward remittance of US$46 billion in the year 2018, a value greater than the $32 billion realized from direct investment in that same year (Lambert et al., 2020).
Too Few Standards
The lack of standard operating procedures and facilities in Pakistan caused the need to procure testing kits from China and Japan (Khalid & Ali, 2020). The coronavirus has become more widespread in the country after the lockdown measures were violated, creating more unhealthy people, according to testing—but of course the same problem of testing is showing here as well, with people testing positive for a coronavirus that does not actually make them sick. All the panic and hysteria is essentially over a phantom. Nonetheless, this new influx of the “infected” has placed a heavy strain on the country's healthcare system and resources as hysterical reactionary measures are introduced in the health care system.
Yet, the impact of this pandemic hysteria is not just seen in terms of how people must struggle now to survive as their day to day lives have been ground to a halt. Health care organizations need to make serious adjustments as well because they must rethink the way they go about planning and preparing for work just from a human resources perspective. It is important that in doing so no one despair in these trying moments, however. As 1 Corinthinas 10:13 states, “No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.”
Impact of Economic Conditions on Human Resource Planning
Nicola et al. (2020) show how disastrous for jobs the economic recession will be. That is another consideration that has to be made because lack of jobs also impacts health—not just of people but also of organizations. Recessions and their opposite—economic booms—greatly affect human resource planning, if not directly then at least indirectly. The rate of inflation, for instance, will have an effect on how people save, how they spend, and how they invest. Personal and consumer decisions are made based on what money is doing in the market, whether the economy is growing or shrinking and so on. People may find it harder to get a job in an economy that is being destroyed by, say, lockdowns caused by hysterical governments attempting to sabotage the health of their nation by restricting the movements of a free populace out of fear of spreading a “virus” that causes people to have symptoms no different from a common cold (Donthu & Gustafsson, 2020).
Many countries have reported total damages in the economies and have loosened COVID-19 containment measures to protect the economies from going to their knees. The health sector is also exhausted in many countries, and handling all patients needing help is no longer possible. Efforts to manage patients in home-based care have been put in place, but only people with mild symptoms can recover from homes. Some guidelines to stop the spread of COVID 19, such as self-isolation, social distance, and travel restrictions, have reduced many companies' workforce, resulting in job loss. The closure of schools has also affected the businesses that depend on the student population to transact. Schools consume several commodities that are either produced on farms or even manufactured in industries. The demand for such goods hasdeclined, and some have opted to change their business line. Food demand has shifted to homes where people are stocking to stay safe just in case of future shortages or a rise in food prices (Nicola et al., 2020).
Low-income earners who get food based on day to day casual labor have faced severe challenges during the lockdown. Discussion on damages caused by lockdown has been based on this class of people. The need to support this category of people is the main issue(Gopalan & Misra, 2020). Small businesses have also been affected, and some have opted to close or change to other businesses that they think will survive in the current environment. Some of the affected small businesses include those that deal with cash flow, sales and marketing, supply chain, health, and safety (Donthu & Gustafsson, 2020).
The Need to Budget Better
While money might be saved on the hiring end, money is going out the door in droves on the expenditures end. HR has to have print resources available for training purposes, for messaging, and so on, and yet the cost of print resources has skyrocketed as printing presses have all but stopped in the past few months. The price of everything has gone up since the government has pumped trillions of new dollars into the system. Prices are double in some cases what they were before. HR must look for any way it can to pinch pennies in order to be able to afford what it needs in terms of office supplies so that it can stay within its budget for the year. It may be that HR ends up not hiring for the position of HR manager at all, and instead the position is filled by combining tasks of two other members of the HR staff. But what will this do to morale?
Resource planning is thus an important part of the job of HR, and HR should not only be reactive to what is happening with economic conditions but should also be proactive. Any amount not spent in its budget should be invested so that the department is able to grow a nest egg for future situations in which costs go up due to economic fallout. Preparation and prevention are the best cures for economic ailments. Planning ahead by putting money into investments that could be used when the time comes is one way that an HR department could engage in resource planning in a more effective manner.
The Risk of Uncertainty
Shrestha et al. (2020) look at the influences on economic growth due to the COVID-19 outbreak and show that the pandemic's sudden occurrence and the measures implemented to handle the crisis have introduced uncertainties into economic growth. These uncertainties can have majorly detrimental effects the world over in numerous ways. For instance, the US educational institutions have suffered massive losses in revenue due to the cancellation of study abroad programs. This economic loss is estimated to be as high as 1 billion dollars.
Those losses do not stop just at the educational institutions either. They carry over into the real economy, because if fewer people are being educated it means fewer people are in the talent pool, which means fewer people to choose from for workers. Everything snowballs until it gets to a point that organizations cannot hire the right kind of talent because the talent pool has dried up. Educational institutions should not be closed—nothing should be closed—but the hysteria has reached fever pitch and with everyone wearing masks to reinforce the idea that the coronavirus is a real risk few question the actual sense of closing schools are how that will impact health down the line. Obviously if there is less work and fewer jobs health becomes an issue.
Black Swan
The COVID-19 disease has been labeled as a black swan event. Roy (2020) explains the COVID-19 outbreak as a “black swan effect” by arguing that there was very little to predict the sudden event and several strong economies worldwide, including the US, went into a state of shock. This shock affected the nation's supply and demand as there is heavy dependence on China-manufactured goods the world over. That much is very true. Nixon’s opening of trade with Communist China was the first step in ending a hostile approach by the US towards stifling the self-determination of nations by attempting to restrict their influence in the trafficking of ideologies. It was meant to be seen as a positive step for capitalism. However, the problem that emerged, particularly in the 1990s was that the US began exporting labor, offshoring jobs so that companies could cut costs by hiring cheap labor in Asia. This effectively killed manufacturing in the US. China became the dominant producer of goods in the world and it did so on the cheap. Its economy grew while the middle class in the US began to shrink. In the 21st century, Trump has called on US companies to bring manufacturing back to the US and has initiated a trade war with China for this reason. However, with so many companies relying on China for manufacturing it has made disruptions in supply very painful for them.
Offshoring has had its own negative effects on domestic markets. The Trump Administration has sought to reshore jobs by placing tariffs on China and by lowering the corporate tax bracket, but many companies are still reluctant to reshore because so much can change from one administration to the next in the US, and a company must adopt a long-term strategy. For people the world over, it means that labor will likely continue to be sought from those willing to do it for less. That means slave labor, child labor, and cheap labor abroad will continue on. The politics that results from all this predictable, as every country essentially takes part in the scheme: globalism has arrived and is here to stay. At the same time, nationalism has reared its head in the US, in China, in Russia and in England. Whether it will have a major impact on global capitalism remains to be seen. In the end, the world is a business, and the socio-economic classes that proliferate will be those that fit into the paradigms that the ruling class of the global capitalist world insist upon. If this means the destruction of the middle class, as appears to be happening in the US and other parts of the world, so be it. The ruling class prospers every time the markets are bailed out by central banks, as their investments are not allowed to crater for very long. The entire socio-economic system the world over is oriented towards protecting the ruling class in a non-egalitarian society.
Bright Spot
The one bright spot in the otherwise dreary prognosis for 2020 is that COVID-19 has increased interest in reshoring, i.e., bringing manufacturing back to America. Coupled with tensions from the trade war with China under the Trump administration, bringing manufacturing back to Western hemisphere has appeared a more enticing prospect than in years past. Two in three manufacturers have indicated that they are likely to reshore, most of that coming within the agricultural, food & beverage, and energy sectors.
Sir James Goldsmith has advocated for reshoring and opposed offshoring on moral and socio-economic principles, arguing that when manufacturing jobs are sent away the populace at home becomes disconnected from the product and the company that produces it. Without this connectivity, there is no genuine sense of being a stakeholder and no genuine interest in having a working relationship with the manufacturer when other options are easily available in the globalized world. From that position the future of American manufacturing depends entirely on what company owners want: do they want a future in which there is a relationship between themselves and stakeholders? Or do they want a future that focuses solely on the bottom line without any sense of duty or loyalty to any one place or people? The answer to these questions will determine the future of manufacturing in America.
What the Government Can Do Better
The best ways the government can handle the pandemic are to be effective and limit economic hardships from future pandemics. To address such events in the future, the United States needs to increase its response capability to such situations (Blumenthal, Fowler, Abrams & Collins, 2020). Hashmi et al. (2020) note for example that the economic effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the hospitals has to be considered. The rising cases of coronavirus patients are overburdening hospitals, reducing all hospital operations to the most vital.
Outpatient clinics and elective operative work have been suspended by most hospitals to focus on more vital operations. This action will result in a major loss of revenue from the suspended services. In reducing the spread of the infection among patients and healthcare workers, hospitals have to procure personal protective equipment, which will constitute further financial drain. Hashmi et al. (2020) show that these economic challenges are affecting the functionality of hospitals and have to be addressed; but governments are busy bailing out the Fortune 500 and the banks—they are less interested in the health care industry except when it comes to how close to “capacity” the ICUs are.
Managing Disease without Lockdowns
Lenzen et al. (2020) show that the consequences of the pandemic have affected social and economic conditions, which have changed society. Consequences such as lockdowns global reductions in production and consumption have engendered a cascading effect along the global supply chains. Lenzen et al. (2020) emphasize the implementation of preparedness measures, which will cause the least social changes for the population and low economic disruption for businesses. In other words, the government has to know in advance how to respond and not to respond to a pandemic. Going into lockdown mode is not the correct way to do it.
Chudik, Mohaddes, Pesaran, Raissi & Rebucci (2020) note as much by highlighting the consequences of the pandemic and establishing ways of analyzing the pandemic. Considering the disruptions in the interconnected world economy, an empirical economic analysis will be suitable for examining the pandemic's nature. In completing the empirical economic analysis, the following key elements must be included: the identification of such an event, an account for the non-linear effects of the pandemic, a consideration of the pandemic's global cascading effect, and quantification of the uncertainties surrounding the forecast of such events.
Conclusion
The pandemic has hit hard agricultural and food sectorsof many countries. Disruption of the supply chain has affected these two sectors due to delays in custom and credit markets. The food industry also depends heavily on the transport industry. Therefore cessation of movement in countries had posed the world to another danger of experiencing food shortage in the future (Shrestha et al., 2020). COVID-19 will advance the health challenges that were already in existence, and the government should focus more on stopping damages that cannot be recovered. Prevention measures will help more to stop deaths that are affecting the population. UN Security Council advises nations to protect Vulnerable population whose survival rate is less when exposed to the virus. Some of the vulnerable groups include the elderly and people living with conditions such as diabetes. Nations have used police in enforcing containment measures. In some cases, police have violated human rights, and according to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the rate at which this is happening is alarming (Lambert et al., 2020). Patience and faith in God are needed in times like these more than anything else. Psalms 107:19-21 should remind all: “Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble, and he saved them from their distress. He sent out his word and healed them; he rescued them from the grave. Let them give thanks to the LORD for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for mankind.”
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