Costs and benefits of early response in the COVID-19 outbreak in Cameroon: DALYs, treatment cost and labour supply lost

COVID-19 has had multiple effects on our daily lives and led to a general recession of what is today known as the Coronavirus recession. This is an  economic recession across the world economy in 2020 due to the 2019/20 coronavirus pandemic (Schwartz, 2020).The trajectory of COVID-19 is  highly uncertain. Variables include how long it will take for the virus to play out, how many people will be infected, how many will die, and whether the virus will spread significantly( Zandi et al, 2020). There is thus a need for studies to analyze the detail cost and benefit of an early response to  this pandemic. This work sets out to calculate the costs and benefits of early response in the COVID-19 outbreak in Cameroon using DALYs, healthcare expenditure and labour supply lost. In order to do this, secondary data was collected from the Ministry of Public Health periodic reports on the COVID-19 situation and from the global disease burden report published in 2015. Data were analyzed using standard formula as used in Shutterstock, (2020) to calculate DALY, while percentages, algebra and other descriptive statistical tools like charts were used to present findings. Results showed that Cameroon had 658, 2265, 7599 and 14,916 cases one, two, three and months respectively after the outbreak. Results further show a 16.37 loss years of “healthy” life per person and a total of 10771.46DALYs, 37078.05DALYs, 124,395.6DALYs and 244,174.9DALYs after one, two, three and four months of onset. Health care expenditure for all patients stood at 2.632M, 9.060M, 30,396M and 59,664M FCFA for one, two, three and four months respectively after onset COVID 19 6 of March 2020. Lastly, all patients in total lost 105,280, 362,400, 1215840 and 2386560 hours of labour one, two, three and four months respectively after the onset of COVID 19 in Cameroon. This study thus concludes that COVID-19 has enormous cost to patients and government and a timely intervention will lead to great benefits. It recommends strict adherence to government’s preventive measures modified from the WHO guide. This will lessen the economic consequences of COVID 19 in Cameroon thus preventing the Economy from sinking into a recession. Key words : Covid-19, Cost, benefit and Intervention, Cameroon, DALY, economic, Recession