Global Healthcare Resource Efficiency in the Management of COVID-19 Death and Infection Prevalence Rates

In this paper, we use a novel DEA approach, developed by You and Yan (2011), which accounts for both desirable outputs (recovered cases) and undesirable outputs (infections and deaths), to analyse the technical efficiency of the health systems of 36 most infected countries during the first 11 months since the COVID-19 outbreak. The average technical efficiency scores across the 3 Models is 52%. Specifically, 6 of the 36 (17%) countries in our sample largely used tests, doctors and health spending efficiently in managing the COVID-19 case-mortality and prevalence rates. The remaining 30 DMUs used their available resources inefficiently. Developing countries performed better than developed nations who were inefficient. Therefore, most countries literally “threw” resources at fighting the pandemic, thereby probably raising inefficiency through wasted resource use. The study also showed that developed countries could also draw lessons from developing countries in the management of pandemics. The latter countries mostly face pandemics on a daily basis, therefore, have developed strategies to manage them