Assessment of the Impact of Covid-19 on Selected Health and Economic Indicators in Ghana

Abstract

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic brought challenging situations to many countries. The effect, nevertheless, might be more extreme for poorer countries who are in distress need and whose circumstances might get worse if ignored. While the COVID-19 pandemic affects many aspects of everyday life and society, this paper focuses on how the outbreak has affected some economic and health indicators in Ghana. Methods: This study analyzed secondary data from various sources including the Bank of Ghana,- the main source of data for the Economic indicators and the District Health Information Management Solutions (DHIMs)-main source of data for the health indicators. The interrupted time series design was used to model the effect of the pandemic on selected indicators using two years before the pandemic as the baseline and two years post-pandemic as the endline. The estimation procedure for this study was Quantile and Negative Binomial regression. Results: COVID-19 does not have any significant effect on GDP growth (P-value>0.05 CI: [-0.41, 1.87]) and Government revenue (P-value<0.05). Conclusion - COVID-19 did not have any significant effect on GDP growth of the economy. Government revenue was significantly reduced because of COVID-19. The incidence of depression, OPD attendance and hypertension all increased positively due to the incidence of COVID-19. This increase was significant immediately after the impact of COVID-19. Therefore, the governments must make stopping this disease and preserving lives their top priority. Health system needs to be well structured in making it more resilient for future occurrence by investing in healthcare.