COVID-19 : DOES INDIA HAS ENOUGH MEDICAL FACILITY TO HANDLE THIS EPIDEMIC?

India confirmed its first case of COVID-19 on January 30,With in few weeks the  cases are quickly increasing across the globe, In India just report with 1251 corona cases till now, in the Pan India the confirmed COVID-19 cases have increased with speed ,till now  32 people has died. The surge in corona virus cases has disable health systems in many countries, primarily due to shortage of hospital beds, manpower and equipment  like personal protective equipment, ventilators etc.

Health Services problem in globe

Many Countries affected by this epidemic responded in multiple ways, China built hospitals with thousands of temporary beds in a short period, the United Kingdom urged community members to volunteer with the National Health Service to tackle the problem.

The supply of essential resources can be inelastic in the short term. However, this pandemic has revealed that one way to handle the increasing demand for healthcare is to ‘flatten the curve’.

This is essentially achieved by social distancing which slows down the spread of disease and provides a much-needed breathing space to the health system to deal with rising number of patients.

If the number of cases continue to rise at this pace, then temporary beds will be needed. There are already suggestions about converting hotel rooms and train coaches into make shift temporary hospital wards.

Medical supply Network in Pan India

In this piece we focus on availability of government hospital beds for major states in India. Using data from National Health Profile–2019, we observed that there are 7,13,986 total government hospital beds available in India. This amounts to 0.55 beds per 1000 population.

However, an absolutely binding constraint in the healthcare sector is that of doctors. Thus, the total stock of doctors in a country cannot be increased quickly in the short run. In India’s growing number of COVID-19 patients and compare it with the existing capacity of doctors, in order to forecast when India will face capacity limits in terms of available doctors to treat hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

India’s Health Infrastructure and Lock down

We use data on confirmed COVID-19 patients from the official statistics of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. The Government of India announced a nation-wide lock down for three weeks, starting from March 25 till 14 April 2020.

The expectation is that this will slow down the disease transmission. In an optimistic scenario, this will lead to a doubling of cases at a slower pace, which we assume to be after every seven-days in our main analysis. We do a back-of-the-envelope calculation using a seven-day cycle where we extrapolate the number of confirmed cases for the next few weeks.

We compare this number with the total capacity of the health system in terms of patients who can be treated by doctors available in India.

We use the number of total registered doctors from the National Health Profile 2019. Out of these, we assume that around 80% are available which includes doctors of all specialties including cardiologists, surgeons, general medicine etc.