Health sufficiency and COVID-19

Abstract

Covid-19 is an infectious and highly contagious disease that is spread through contact or proximity when an infected person coughs or sneezes. According to recent studies, lethality caused by COVID-19 is not high, but due to the ease of transmission, dissemination and contagion, this disease has caused a worldwide pandemic status. As a result, health systems in all the affected countries have collapsed. Given the difficulties to obtain the features of any country all around the world, it is essential to design indicators capable of comparing the state of the systems and evaluating their evolution, according to the incidence and mortality of the disease in the population. This work presents the Health Sufficiency Indicator (HSI), in its accumulated and daily versions, which allows to evaluate the capacity of a health system to give response to the corresponding needs arising from a pandemic. This indicator is useful to compare the development of the disease among countries with the available data. In addition, other common indicators relation to the number of cases, number of deaths and number of discharges are analyzed. Finally, the HSI is used to estimate the development of the disease and its impact on the Spanish health system, both on national and regional levels.