Working Paper: NBER ID: w27173
Authors: Pinka Chatterji; Yue Li
Abstract: There is growing concern that the COVID-19 pandemic may have severe, adverse effects on the health care sector, a sector of the economy that historically has been somewhat shielded from the business cycle. In this paper, we study one aspect of this issue by estimating the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic on use of outpatient health services. We use 2010-2020 data from the Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network (ILINet). Our findings indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic is associated with about a 67 percent decline in the total number of outpatient visits per provider by the week of April 12-18th, 2020 relative to the same week in prior years. Effects become apparent earlier in the pandemic for outpatient visits for non-flu symptoms, but we find negative effects on outpatient visits for flu symptoms as well.
Keywords: COVID-19; Health care; Outpatient services; Pandemic; Economic impact
JEL Codes: I00
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| COVID-19 pandemic (H12) | decline in outpatient visits (I11) |
| COVID-19 pandemic (H12) | decline in outpatient visits for non-flu symptoms (I19) |
| COVID-19 pandemic (H12) | decline in outpatient visits for flu-like symptoms (I12) |
| decline in outpatient visits for flu-like symptoms (I12) | timing of decline differs from non-flu visits (C41) |