PIN66 A Scoping Review of the Literature on the Multifactorial Health-Economics Burden Caused By the COVID-19 Pandemic

Context: A considerable amount of evidence exists on the epidemiological features as well as on the mortality trends associated with the COVID-19 pandemic However, much less is known about the health-economics burden Objectives: To summarize the currently existing evidence and to identify evidence gaps on the quantification of the multifactorial burden caused by the COVID-19 pandemic Methods: We retrieved all the articles published in English from January 1st to June 30th 2020, indexed in MEDLINE, that matched a series of combined-keyword queries Manual curation was used to classify articles either as relevant or non-relevant to the subject Results: 61 positive hits were identified Out of those, 22 articles were deemed to be relevant Most of the articles provided evidence on high-income countries (USA, KR, ITA, CN) and barely no evidence is available for middle and low-income countries No COVID-19 specific data exists to quantify direct medical costs, nor to estimate COVID-19 specific utility and disability weights Some authors have reported estimates based on health-economics extrapolations made from other respiratory tract infections, which they then apply to different hypothetical COVID-19 epidemiological scenarios Several authors have published work on the macro-economic consequences of the pandemic Other burden dimensions that have been explored are the impact on mental health, the increase of domestic violence because of the lockdown, and the generalized loss of confidence that might lead to a stock market crisis Conclusions: Multiple evidence gaps remain to be filled on the health-economics burden caused by the COVID-19 pandemic In the short-term, filling those gaps would be important for the decision-making process to tackle the pandemic In the long-term, it could facilitate the definition of pandemic-preparedness policies around the world