Abstract
This study aimed to estimate both direct medical and indirect costs of treating the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) from a societal perspective in the patients at a referral hospital in Fars province as well as the economic burden of COVID-19 in Iran in 2020.MethodsThis study is a partial economic evaluation and a cross-sectional cost-description study conducted based on the data of the COVID-19 patients referred to a referral university hospital in Fars province between March and July 2020. The data were collected by examining the patients’ records and accounting information systems. The subjects included all the inpatients with COVID-19 (477 individuals) who admitted to the medical centre during the 4 months. Bottom-up costing (also called micro-costing approach), incidence-based and income-based human capital approaches were used as the main methodological features of this study.ResultsThe direct medical costs were estimated to be 28,240,025,968 Rials ($ 1,791,172) in total with mean cost of 59,203,409 Rials ($ 3755) per person (SD = 4684 $/ 73,855,161 Rials) in which significant part (41%) was that of intensive and general care beds (11,596,217,487 Rials equal to $ 735,510 (M = 24,310,728 Rials or $ 1542, SD = 34,184,949 Rials or $ 2168(. The second to which were the costs of medicines and medical consumables (28%). The mean indirect costs, including income loss due to premature death, economic production loss due to hospitalization and job absenteeism during recovery course were estimated to be 129,870,974 Rials ($ 11,634) per person. Furthermore, the economic burden of the disease in the country for inpatient cases with the definitive diagnosis was 22,688,925,933,095 Rials equal to $ 1,439,083,784.ConclusionThe results of this study showed that the severe status of the disease would bring about the extremely high cost of illness in this case. It is estimated that the high prevalence rate of COVID-19 has been imposing a heavy economic burden on the country and health system directly that may result in rationing or painful cost-control approaches.
Highlights
The novel coronavirus disease, currently known as Coronavirus disease 2019 or COVID-19, was first introduced as an epidemic in December 2019 in Wuhan, Hubei, China [1, 2]
According to the statistics published on the worldometers database, more than 16,433,715 million people in the world had been infected with COVID-19 by July 2020, of whom over 652,454 individuals have lost their lives
The research population consisted of all the patients with COVID-19 who had referred to a primary referral medical centre for COVID-19 patients in Fars province, Iran, by July 2020
Summary
The novel coronavirus disease, currently known as Coronavirus disease 2019 or COVID-19 (caused by the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen), was first introduced as an epidemic in December 2019 in Wuhan, Hubei, China [1, 2] It was increasingly spread in many countries on all five continents of the world, with the World Health Organization (WHO) announcing in March 2020 that the COVID-19 pandemic was one of the health issues raising international concern [3]. According to the statistics published on the worldometers database, more than 16,433,715 million people in the world had been infected with COVID-19 by July 2020, of whom over 652,454 individuals have lost their lives The information of this database showed 291, 172 and 15,700 for these two figures about Iran, respectively [5]. Modelling studies by the World Health Organization showed that stopping the provision of antiretroviral therapy services in the Sub-Saharan could lead to an additional 500,000 AIDS-related deaths [10, 11]
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