In this analysis, we have modeled the economic costs associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection in HCWs in the first year of the pandemic in three countries and two provinces of a fourth as they were incurred along three pathways. Unsurprisingly, SARS-CoV-2 infection in HCWs resulted in enormous societal costs, especially in settings where HCWs experienced disproportionately high rates of SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to the general population. Our findings corroborate other reports of higher SARS-CoV-2 infection rates in HCWs compared to the general population from all income settings and regions12,13,14. Sites in this study with substantial differences in the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate between HCWs and the general population bore the greatest financial toll as a percentage of total public health expenditure, with a societal ‘price’ per HCW infection that is several times higher than the per capita GDP. The economic costs associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection in HCWs are preventable if infectious risks to HCWs are mitigated upfront by working towards safer health facilities with full implementation of infection prevention and control (IPC) measures and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) standards. There are robust IPC standards and extensive normative occupational health guidance15,16,17, reiterated by World Health Assembly resolution A74/A/CONF./6. Increased and coordinated investments in IPC training, supplies (including PPE), and monitoring—as well as adequate WASH facilities— are needed to support the full implementation of IPC guidance; implementation research may also help in this regard.
When HCWs are infected with SARS-CoV-2 (or other infectious pathogens), the health and economic impacts of those infections go far beyond the individual health and livelihoods of those HCWs. Although the cost of primary SARS-CoV-2 infection and related deaths in HCWs is not insignificant, the scale of economic losses mostly reflects onward infectious transmission from infected HCWs and disruptions in essential maternal and child health services as a result of HCW illness, isolation, or death. The extensive economic costs associated with disruptions in essential services estimated here are consistent with previous research documenting the sizable costs associated with HCW shortages in LMICs18,19. For example, the shortage of HCWs in LMICs due to the ongoing migration of physicians from LMICs to high-income countries is associated with an annual cost of US$15.86 billion as a result of mortality among children and pregnant women18. Additionally, a modeling study on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic estimated that even small reductions in the availability of HCWs (for any reason), supplies as well as both demand for and access to health care would compromise a range of essential services and result in 24,400 additional maternal deaths and 417,000 additional child deaths per year globally19. These estimates not only demonstrate the need to closely monitor infection rates in HCWs during epidemics and pandemics but also highlight the importance of quantifying the economic costs of HCW infections and communicating the economic consequences of HCW infections effectively to the public.
Our modeled results show that maternal and child deaths due to compromised health service delivery contribute to a significant share of the total economic losses stemming from SARS-CoV-2 infections in HCWs. Countries with high rates of maternal and child mortality and inadequate human resources for health are likely to be vulnerable to even small changes in the health care workforce. Most maternal and child deaths are avoidable, and excess maternal and child deaths due to service disruptions are tragic reversals of earlier progress20. Of the countries and provinces included in this study, Eswatini and Kenya had the highest pre-pandemic under-five mortality rate (U5MR) and maternal mortality rate (MMR), and our cost estimates in Kenya and Eswatini were sensitive to the U5MR and MMR elasticities relative to HCW density as well as changes in productivity for HCWs remaining in post. In countries with high U5MR and MMR, there may be fewer other stopgaps in place to prevent unnecessary deaths when the health care workforce is (further) compromised. As maternal and child health services seem to be particularly sensitive to workforce disruptions during public health emergencies, dedicated measures to safeguard maternal and child health in countries with high baseline maternal and child mortality rates are critical. These might include task-shifting or bolstering child health with interventions that do not depend on HCW density21. Countries in this study implemented different measures to mitigate essential health service disruptions. Colombia developed a pandemic containment plan which included human resource retention strategies22, and new HCWs were hired in Kenya’s public sector23. The high costs incurred by excess maternal and child mortality highlight the importance of both protecting HCWs from infection and adopting other strategies to safeguard services that are sensitive to HCW density.
We have specifically considered the detrimental impact of SARS-CoV-2 infection among HCWs on the delivery of essential maternal and child health services, although many health services have been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Disruptions in maternal and child health services occurred in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic for many reasons other than HCW infection, including, but not limited to, decisions to suspend or reduce certain services or facilities; public health measures such as movement restrictions to ‘flatten the curve’ of SARS-CoV-2 infections; the surging volume of patients with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 in some settings or, elsewhere, sharp declines in patient attendance (for fear of infection or as a result of movement restrictions); supply chain interruptions; and HCW redeployment away from preventive to acute care services. All these factors contributed to a substantial increase in maternal and child deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic19. While HCW infections are not the only variable affecting service delivery, they can acutely worsen health outcomes by exacerbating already severe workforce shortages.
The COVID-19 pandemic has again spurred countries and the global development community to invest in and prioritize building resilient health systems24. Resilient health systems can adapt public health functions to mount a timely response to an infectious threat while protecting HCWs in order to preserve essential health service delivery. The economic cost of SARS-CoV-2 infections in HCWs as a percentage of total health expenditure was highest in the four study sites with the lowest HCW density. Efforts to maintain and adequately protect the health workforce during public health emergencies are, therefore, integral to strategies to strengthen health systems’ resilience. All aspects of human resource production, deployment, and compensation should be oriented toward fortifying the health care workforce. Well-developed hazard compensation policies, for example, in Vietnam25, demonstrate a recognition of the importance of maintaining an adequate health care workforce in times of crisis. Deployment of the health workforce during a crisis must be accompanied by comprehensive measures to support HCWs, including physical protection, psychological support, and child/family support. Many of these measures were implemented in various countries during the COVID-19 pandemic and require institutionalization24. Given the importance of HCWs for implementing public health emergency responses—and the ways in which lower HCW density can compromise essential health services—policies to attract, retain, and motivate qualified HCWs should be placed at the center of building more resilient health systems in LMICs.
The enormous economic cost associated with SARS-CoV-2 infections in HCWs as well as the moral imperative to protect HCWs during infectious outbreaks, demand accountability from governments, with guidance from WHO and adequate financing. While many countries adopted various strategies to protect HCWs during the pandemic and allocated resources to address the gaps and challenges26,27,28, a holistic approach to protecting HCWs is needed. In addition to building and maintaining a core health care workforce, governments are responsible for mobilizing and allocating resources to protect health workers, ensuring proper use of these resources, and being accountable for the results.
Unlike many economic burdens of disease studies, which estimate the overall economic burden of a disease29,30, we teased out the economic burden specifically attributable to SARS-CoV-2 infections in HCWs, which is one of the strengths of this study. Whereas this represents a fraction of the overall economic burden of the COVID-19 pandemic, the results of this modeling study are consistent with previous estimates of economic costs attributable to HCW infections, illness, and deaths in an infectious outbreak. For example, the economic burden due to HCW deaths and disruptions in health service delivery due to reduced HCW supply was estimated to be nearly double the costs of Ebola-related deaths in the 2014 Ebola virus disease outbreak29.
The costs presented in this paper are likely to be conservative estimates of the cost to society of SARS-CoV-2 infections in HCWs for several reasons. First, it is likely that SARS-CoV-2 infections, related illnesses, and deaths were underreported. Under-reporting is common for infectious diseases generally, but challenges in accurately reporting SARS-CoV-2 infections and deaths are well recognized, including poor access to diagnostic tests in the first year of the pandemic, limited testing capacity, and inability to determine causality in the event of death31. Second, SARS-CoV-2 infections and related illnesses and deaths among HCWs are likely to have longer-term impacts on the health workforce pipeline that we did not attempt to capture. Third, we did not include SARS-CoV-2 infections in community health workers (CHWs) in this analysis because the five study sites lacked adequate data on both SARS-CoV-2 infection rates and the size of the CHW workforce. Economic losses would have been higher if CHWs were included in the analysis, especially in countries such as Kenya, Eswatini, and South Africa, where CHWs play an important role in health care delivery. Finally, we focused on three pathways through which HCW infections incur economic costs. While these pathways likely comprise the most important sources of economic losses, we were not able to quantify (1) the costs associated with worse health outcomes beyond excess maternal and child mortality, especially with respect to non-communicable diseases, which are prevalent; (2) nor does this analysis include the cost of training HCWs to replace those who are no longer working or alive as a result of SARS-CoV-2 infection; and (3) this study does not account for the costs associated with the mental health impacts of COVID-19 on HCWs or other long-term sequelae of infection such as long COVID32.
Please note that all estimates presented in this paper pertain to the first year of the pandemic when there were substantial shortages of PPE, COVID-19 vaccination coverage among both the general population and HCWs was extremely low, and the capacity of health systems in some countries to respond to COVID-19 was quite limited. All these factors contributed to the potentially high economic costs presented in this paper. Since then, many circumstances have improved. With reduced virulence of the virus, much greater vaccine coverage, and enhanced treatment and testing capacities, the economic burden of HCW infections in subsequent years is likely to be substantially lower.
Several limitations of this study should be acknowledged. First, this study does not use an infectious disease transmission model to estimate the secondary infections from infected HCWs in each country. Instead, we estimated the odds ratio of infection for close contacts of HCWs based on an epidemiological study in a high-income country and used a log-linear regression to adjust for the difference in the relative risks faced by HCWs in each country. Further epidemiological research is likely to enable the global public health community to estimate the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission more precisely in different settings.
Second, data on SARS-CoV-2 infection and associated deaths in HCWs for the two sites in South Africa do not include data from the private sector. Data from the other study sites represent composite information from both the public and private sectors. If infections and deaths occurring in the private sector in Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces were included in this analysis, the economic costs would be even higher for Pathway 1. Limited evidence from Saudi Arabia suggests that SARS-CoV-2 infection rates may be similar between public and private facilities33. Assuming this is also true for the five sites in this study, the economic costs along Pathways 2 and 3 would not significantly vary. In this study, we do not extrapolate findings from the two provinces in South Africa to other provinces or to the whole country. However, it is important to understand the differences in the socio-economic (e.g., wages of HCWs) and health system situation (e.g., HCW density, MMR, and U5MR) between the two provinces and the whole country for any effort to use the parameters from the two provinces to estimate the economic burden for South Africa as a whole. While the model’s estimates provide the total economic burden for each site, they don’t account for variations within countries or individual sites. This is because the parameters used in the model represent site averages.
Third, some data were not available at the study sites. Thus, we had to make assumptions or draw from published literature from neighboring countries. Taking the cost per meal and cost of travel in Eswatini as an example, we used the analogous prices for South Africa as proxies when calculating direct non-medical costs. These inaccuracies are not likely to substantively change our results as we used the best available data to substitute for missing figures.
Fourth, some costs were not fully captured in the model. For example, estimating indirect costs due to loss of income would benefit from a more accurate rate of long-term absenteeism and the cost of HCW replacement. In this study, these costs are not included because data on the rates of long-term absenteeism are lacking. Additionally, the cost of presenteeism is not fully estimated. We assumed a 10% reduction in productivity among HCWs not infected (or not known to be infected) with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. However, the costs due to burnout and mental health impacts in HCWs are not included. Thus, the overall economic burden may be underestimated.
Fifth, in estimating potential service disruptions due to illness and deaths in HCWs, we did not account for steps that countries took to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on their health workforce. Kenya hired more HCWs in the public sector23, for example, and Colombia accelerated the validation of foreign qualifications and deployed medical students and graduates22. The impact of these actions on the estimated economic burden depends on the degree to which they actually boosted the health workforce in practice.
Finally, we could not precisely calculate the change in the productivity of HCWs who remained in their post in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Productivity could vary by the number of colleagues absent, the number of deaths in HCW colleagues or family members, mental health status, the presence of post-covid symptoms, and changes in patient demand. Instead, we assumed that all these factors reduced the overall productivity by an estimated 10% based on a prior study19. The sensitivity analysis shows that results from Kenya are sensitive to this assumption. Even under the low-impact scenario, which utilizes a 5% decrease in productivity, this still translates to US$10,641 lost per HCW infection, 5.7 times higher than per capita GDP.