Investor Presentaiton
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Chapter VII - Impacts of COVID-19: Fiscal Pressures and Healthcare Deficit
Effects of COVID -19 on Economic Outlook
he rampant Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has quickly evolved from a provincial health scare in China to a global pandemic. While
it has brought nearly half the world to a standstill, it has affected the financial markets in unseen ways by eroding a quarter of wealth
in nearly a month. A colossal challenge confronts us as a pandemic, we understand little about, sweeps across the globe. With 33
mutations of this virus, the use of data and technology to swiftly understand the changing landscape is more important than ever.
The exponential spread of COVID-19 around the globe has become a real challenge for humanity.
Government of Punjab initiated its response to combat the virus at quite an early stage by
sensitizing public about its severity, enhancing the testing capacity and
strengthening its hospital capacity vis-à-vis bed strength. Even the high-
income countries with a well-developed Healthcare system were
overwhelmed with this pandemic within the first few weeks and several
are reeling under the havoc caused by it. In contrast, Pakistan is a
low middle income country which spends less than 1% of its GDP
on Health and this came up with a big challenge for the
Governments and policy makers to deal the pandemic. The
Health system is already not up to the mark and there are
many disparities in the healthcare delivery between the
rural and urban areas. The doctor-to-patient ratio in
Pakistan is 78: 100,000 and number of hospital beds
is mere 0.6:1000.4 Before the COVID-19 pandemic
set in, there was no proper National Health plan or
Government strategy in place to tackle such a
healthcare crisis as the cumulative capacity of the
Government Hospitals in Punjab stood at 40,660 beds
against the population of around 110 million showing
is a huge gap. The instant Pandemic has unearthed
the systematic deficiencies in the existing Health
infrastructure including the non-availability of reliable
data, absence of disaster management framework in
Health sector, insufficient communication framework for
preventive Health Care etc.
The rapid increase in local transmission of COVID-19 cases has
immensely stressed out the already insufficient healthcare
infrastructure in terms of patient handling capacity of the Public
and Private Sector Hospitals. Due to this, Healthcare authorities
faced severe shortage of specialized human resource required to deal
with Corona specific activities and ultimately they had to divert their existing staff
towards COVID-19 wards and on the other hand Healthcare staff belonging to those
non-COVID Health specialties and establishments was compelled to deal with a
Pandemic they were not trained to cope with. Owing to the shortage of space Provincial
Health Departments were compelled to utilize several health specialty related wards and establishments for
isolating and treating COVID-19 patients. Such improvisations on one hand deprived non-COVID patients from curative healthcare against
serious ailments like Hepatitis-C, Cardiovascular diseases, Neurological disorders and other medical emergencies were not able to receive
the essential curative medical care they needed and on the other hand led to serious neglect of preventive healthcare regime as one of the
most visible negative effects could be seen on anti-polio vaccination campaign.
On the basis of WHO Guidelines and keeping in view the ground realities of the country, the Government has taken multiple steps to mitigate
the various dimensions of the crisis:
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