Disruption Of Non-COVID-19 Health Care In Latin America During The Pandemic: Effects On Health, Lessons For Policy

COVID-19 had severe direct and indirect effects on health and well-being in Latin America. To understand the extent to which disruptions among non-COVID-19-related health services affected population health, we used administrative data from the period 2015–21 to examine public hospital discharges and mortality for conditions amenable to health care in four Latin American countries: Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru. Between March 2020 and December 2021, hospitalization rates for these conditions declined by 28 percent and mortality rates increased by 15 percent relative to prepandemic years. Noncommunicable diseases accounted for 89 percent of this rise in mortality. The poorest states in each country experienced relatively larger increases in mortality. Our results, which focus on the health effects of service disruption, suggest that maintaining health care services in this region during the pandemic could have avoided at least 96,000 deaths. Policies should focus on maintaining essential health care services during emergencies, particularly for patients with noncommunicable diseases, and on minimizing negative consequences by ensuring coordinated and continuous care; leveraging alternative modalities of care, such as telemedicine; broadening the role of nonphysician health care workers; and expanding options for medication delivery.