Despite the world seeing eight times more total health-related financial assistance to fight COVID19 in low and middle-income countries during the first two years of the pandemic, in comparison to that of the preceding decade, authors of a new report said the funding may not be enough calling for sustained support.

The report, published in The Lancet Global Health recently, led by researchers from  Washington University’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, found that maintaining adequate funds is crucial to prevent a future pandemic is challenging for most LMIC countries where substantial funding gaps persist.

“Despite the spike in spending due to pandemic-related support, sustaining this level of investment going forward is a serious concern,” lead author Dr Angela Esi Micah said.

“While countries may be expected to contribute to global pandemic preparedness as they are able, greater participation and coordination globally before the next pandemic are critical,”  she added.

Tracking the flow of funds to combat the pandemic, the authors observed that in the first two years of the pandemic, sub-Saharan Africa received 33.6% of development assistance for health (DAH) for COVID19, yet 13.5% of COVID-19 deaths occurred in the region.

By contrast, the South Asian region of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, and Pakistan, who together reported 27.2% of the COVID19 deaths that occurred in low-and middle-income countries, received only 14.8% of assistance, the researchers found.

The global health development financial support to LMIC countries needs to increase substantially over the next five years to prevent a future pandemic, experts say, with a G20 panel suggesting that the national governments of LMICs need to increase government spending on health by 1% of their GDP.

The committee further recommended that the donor governments should enhance their support by 15 billion dollars over the next five years for pandemic preparedness.

Exploring historical health trends in 204 countries to project global health spending to 2050, the analysis included health funding patterns from 1990 to 2021 and the historic spike in COVID assistance from 2019 to 2020. 

In 2019, global health spending reached $9.2 trillion or $1,183 per person, 2% higher than the previous year and 17.8% higher than in 2010, the analysis projected that it is going to reach $16.9 trillion or $1,827 per person by 2050.

The authors said that while COVID19 assistance did not affect the majority of health sectors, some critical sectors did not record growth.

Using reproductive, maternal, newborn and children's health as an example, the report states that while poor countries received 14.8 billion dollars in DAH for the sector in 2021, it was 2.3% less than in 2019 and continued to decline during the pandemic.

"Our preliminary estimates of DAH for newborn and child health, as well as reproductive and maternal health, show that both decreased between 2019 and 2020. Between 2019 and 2020, funding for newborn and child health fell 2.6%, while funding for reproductive and maternal health fell 6.8%," the researchers wrote in their paper.

“The figures underscore the importance of maintaining the sense of urgency of health care funding in general while also fighting a global pandemic,” the authors concluded.