CGD Policy Blogs

As the coronavirus spreads across the globe and claims an increasing number of victims, calls have been made for the international community to raise and disburse huge sums of money to protect poorer countries, whose poverty and weak health systems make them especially vulnerable.

The COVID-19 health crisis has been paired with sharply lower global demand and a Saudi-Russian price war in the oil market that has reduced commodity prices by around a third. While this seems unprecedented, a concurrent economy-halting epidemic and commodity price rout has happened before, in Liberia, West Africa during the Ebola outbreak of 2014.

As part of the negotiations between the IFC and the US government over a (now agreed) capital increase for the IFC, World Bank Group president David Malpass issued a letter to US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin promising changes in the way IFC does business.

This blog focuses on hospital treatment for COVID-19 patients in low-resource-settings, considering what we know about the spectrum of COVID-19 illness and what this tells us about where resources might best be focused in low-resource-settings. As elsewhere, decision makers, global and local, must prioritise resourcing and capacity development for the ward-level care and simple oxygen therapy that most hospitalised COVID-19 patients will need—not the high-end clinical care that may well be impossible to scale-up in time in countries with limited resources.