Coronavirus Effect on the HealthCare Industries

The novel coronavirus pandemic has an enormous impact on many people's lives and businesses on a large scale including the healthcare ecosystem. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused disruptions within healthcare systems, both directly as a result of the infectious disease epidemic and indirectly as a result of public health efforts to prevent transmission. This disruption has resulted from rapid complex fluctuations in demand, capacity, and even qualitative facets of health care. Physical and mental breakdowns among healthcare providers, as well as insufficient services and resources in healthcare practice environments, continue to pose significant challenges. The healthcare industry has been working actively and overtime during Covid-19 to keep workers safe. Dentists, otolaryngologists, head and neck surgeons, respiratory therapists, infectious disease physicians, and gastroenterologists are among the healthcare professionals which are at greater risk to infect with the virus.

Healthcare challenges during COVID 19

Healthcare sectors all over the world are struggling to deal with a huge supply-demand mismatch. Manufacturing plant closures have resulted in a shortage of medications, diagnostic kits, and other critical products, putting global medical supply chains at risk. Pharmaceutical firms are attempting to make peace with this new fact and are searching for ways to minimize and potentially avoid the COVID-19 epidemic from reoccurring. Clinical trials are being accelerated by governments, hospitals, investors, pharmaceutical firms, and other associated businesses. With the continuous rise in the positive cases, the demand for medical ventilators is increasing globally. It has been discovered that approximately 5% of all positive COVID-19 cases are extreme and require ventilators for smooth breathing. As a result, there is an increasing demand for medical ventilators all over the world. To satisfy the ongoing demand, the majority of companies have increased their production capacity.

Source – Amnesty International

Mexico (1,320), the United States (1,077), the United Kingdom (649), Brazil (634), Russia (631), India (573), South Africa (240), Italy (188), Peru (183), Indonesia (181), Iran (164), and Egypt (159) are the countries with the highest reported number of health workers died by COVID-19

Short term and long term impact of COVID 19 on healthcare

In the near term, healthcare systems will face two big challenges. The first would be the healthcare workforce's physical and emotional fatigue, as well as worn-out hospital facilities. The second issue will be the ever-increasing “backlog” of medical procedures. For example, high-risk patients' inability or fear of seeing a doctor is causing problems with chronic disease management and delaying certain important cancer care procedures. The COVID pandemic would have a long-term effect on healthcare systems, which should be addressed as soon as possible by political and healthcare officials.

Surging Adoption of Digitalization in Healthcare

Healthcare providers across the globe are minimizing in-person contact with their patients owing to fear related to spread of the coronavirus. Technological advances and digitalization is opening a new way for healthcare sector as well as for patients. Technological advances such as online and mobile health apps, 3D printing, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence can improve health care delivery and ways of working during and after the pandemic. Some countries have begun using cell phone location data to map the spread of COVID-19 at the national level.

Source- Statista

The above graph shows the impact of coronavirus on health and medicine website traffic globally as of May 2020.Between January and April 2020 Digital health platforms experienced a 10% increase in global traffic. This is owing to the global pandemic COVID 19 that compelled the populace to stay at home in order to stop the spread of the virus. In May 2020, health and medicine websites generated 581.37 million visits up from 459 million worldwide visits in January 2019.

Fatpos global predicts companies that perform testing, produce test kits, create potential vaccines, and manufacture or supply medical equipment are likely to benefit the most as COVID-19 healthcare spending grows exponentially. The explanation is obvious -policymakers around the world will invest not only in damage management but also in preventing a pandemic revival.