Assessing the Efficiency of Public Health and Medical Care Services in Curbing the COVID-19 Pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Retrospective Study

In the late of December 2019, a new coronavirus (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV 2) emerged from the city of Wuhan, China and was subsequently declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020 after it had spread to many countries across the globe. On February 28, 2020, the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) reported its first case in Nigeria, and it has since spread to all countries in SSA. Several public health and medical care measures were rolled out by many countries to stem the tide of the spread at the height of the pandemic, between February 28, 2020 and February 28, 2021, period covered by this study. This paper evaluates the levels of health system efficiency of the COVID-19 public health measures and medical care services and their determinants across Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries using country-level data for those countries. The data was analyzed using bootstrap data envelopment analysis (DEA) and other advanced econometric analyses that produce robust estimations of the relationship between health systems efficiency and their determinants. The general finding of the study suggests that there is more room for health systems in SSA to improve their technical efficiency in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. The most important determinants of health system efficiency in the fight against the spread of the virus were GDP per capita, population density, temperature levels, and quality of governance. Adequate health system preparedness and human resource strategies geared towards recruiting and/or retaining well-qualified and experienced healthcare workers to provide professional services would prove critical in containing pandemics of this nature.