Confidence in Healthcare During Pandemics: A Developing Country Perspective

In this chapter, we study the role of individuals’ confidence in healthcare institutions on curative and preventive demand for healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic in India. Specifically, we collate data on pre-pandemic self-reported measures of confidence in healthcare institutions in the private and public sectors and correlate these measures to aspects of demand for healthcare during the pandemic. We find that confidence in healthcare is positively correlated with demand for healthcare, which implies that policymakers must seek to establish credible health care institutions for COVID-19 care to tackle this major public health problem. This is because, in the absence of such credible institutions, which are perceived to be better service providers, the demand for health care is likely to be low, which can mask the actual infection rates leading to underreporting of infections and low vaccine take-up. We present a conceptual framework based on a simple microeconomic theoretical model that can help understand such behavior and use historical data on self-reported confidence measures from a large nationally representative household survey, along with rapidly incoming COVID-19 data, to perform our empirical analysis.