Coughed for trillions – Kommersant

In 2022, the economic damage to the Russian Federation from COVID-19 amounted to more than 1.6 trillion rubles, or almost 1% of the country’s GDP. This figure includes both medical expenses and losses to the economy due to sickness and death of workers. At the end of the year, coronavirus turned out to be the most “expensive” disease among infectious diseases, the “cost” of which for the economy is calculated by Rospotrebnadzor. For comparison, the economic damage from all other diseases, excluding chronic ones, amounted to about 1.4 trillion rubles. The accumulated economic losses of the Russian Federation since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, the service estimated at least 3.6 trillion rubles.

The economic damage to the Russian Federation from the coronavirus pandemic in 2020-2022 amounted to more than 3.6 trillion rubles, follows from the report of Rospotrebnadzor “On the state of sanitary and epidemiological well-being of the population in the Russian Federation in 2022”. The indicator is several times higher than the total damage from other infectious diseases over the same period. As follows from the report, according to the methodology of Rospotrebnadzor, the economic damage from the disease consists of two components – these are direct medical expenses (expenses for medical care of patients during illness) and indirect economic losses (from the patient’s departure from employment during the illness and in connection with death at working age).

According to the report, by the end of 2022, direct medical expenses for the treatment of COVID-19 could range from 760 billion to 1.35 trillion rubles. The first amount was calculated at the Central Research Institute of Epidemiology of Rospotrebnadzor — it takes into account not only the absolute number of cases of COVID-19, but also their distribution by severity and different treatment costs. The second estimate is data from the Federal Compulsory Health Insurance Fund on the average cost of one completed case of COVID-19. Calling these figures “values ​​of the same order”, Rospotrebnadzor offers an “average estimate” of direct medical expenses of 1.1 trillion rubles. As for indirect economic losses, as noted by Rospotrebnadzor, the agency can only estimate the loss of years of life in the event of death at working age, and this indicator gives an estimate of at least 0.5 trillion rubles. The department cannot calculate the loss of working time during the illness due to insufficient published data. Thus, in 2022, the economic losses of the Russian Federation due to the coronavirus amounted to 1.6 trillion rubles, or about 1% of GDP. Thus, according to Rospotrebnadzor, the damage from covid in 2022 exceeded the same indicator for 36 infectious diseases, including HIV, hepatitis C, tuberculosis and influenza. In total, direct and indirect economic losses from these diseases amounted to 1.4 trillion rubles. The largest share of expenses fell on infections of the upper respiratory tract (935 billion rubles), the smallest – on typhoid fever (839 million rubles).

Earlier, Rospotrebnadzor estimated the country’s economic losses due to the coronavirus pandemic and by the end of 2020 – about 1 trillion rubles. (also about 1% of GDP in 2020). Although the agency has not published a report with estimates for 2021, it can be assumed that the amount of economic damage for this period is closer to estimates for 2022: the incidence of more severe forms of coronavirus in 2021 was higher than in 2022, which should have increased spending on treatment, but the main spending on medical infrastructure came in 2020.

As Ksenia Bondarenko, Senior Lecturer at the Department of World Economy at the Faculty of World Economy and World Politics at the Higher School of Economics, notes, Rospotrebnadzor’s assessment can be considered minimal, since when calculating indirect losses, it is also necessary to take into account both the decrease in consumption by the sick person and the consequences of his illness in the form of disability. Note that there are no comparable data for the world economy yet – taking into account economic losses using a similar formula is not included in the list of indicators of the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF). At the same time, if we are talking about losses in economic growth, then, according to the IMF, they will amount to about $13.8 trillion by the end of 2024.

Anastasia Manuylova