Catherine Arsenault at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the U.S. and colleagues will measure the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated containment policies such as curfews on the quality of health care in seven countries and the rates of mortality from non-COVID conditions. They have extracted data from health management information systems spanning two years from Ethiopia, Ghana, Haiti, Laos, Mexico, Nepal, and South Africa. They will first clean the data and then apply an analytical tool called segmented regression analysis to assess the effect of the pandemic on health service delivery, such as the provision of certain preventive and curative services, and use a statistical technique called difference-in-differences estimations to assess the effect of containment policies on healthcare demand, such as patient appointments. This will help countries to address gaps in their health care systems and plan recovery strategies for missed health care.
To measure the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated containment policies such as curfews on health care in seven countries by using health management information systems to evaluate the quality of care and mortality rates from non-COVID conditions.