Objectives
To estimate the economic impact considering the deaths by COVID-19, depressive conditions, and the investment of the Brazilian government to control the pandemic.
Methods
The perspective of the economic model is that of the government of Brazil. Mortality data are those of the Brazilian government until June 26, 2020. We calculate the potential years of productive life lost from the number of deaths for the age group of 20 to 65 years. Next, we estimate the reduction in Brazilian GDP in the coming years due to deaths. The model assumes that everyone would work until age 65, and there would be no death from any cause. We made a projection of GDP per capita until the year 2,060 based on historical data from IBGE. We consider that there will be a reduction of 11.80% in the national GDP for the year 2020, we apply a discount of 5%. In addition, we added a loss of productivity due to depression with a prevalence of 14.60% that resulted in an average of 35.10% loss of productivity per capita over two years after the pandemic. The Brazilian government's total expenditure on COVID-19 was consulted on the National Treasury website on July 6, 2020.
Results
There were 48,041 deaths due to COVID-19. There was a loss of 205,330 years of productive life, corresponding to a loss of R$ 125,991,971,541.85 in the Brazilian GDP over 40 years. The expense with COVID-19 was R$ 211,500,000,000.00, thus totaling an economic impact of R$ 337,491,971,541.85.
Conclusions
The economic impact for the next 40 years of COVID-19 in Brazil exceeds R$ 330 billion when we consider only the years of lost productive life, the depressive conditions resulting from COVID-19 and the government's expenditure on measures to minimize the impacts social, health and national economy of COVID-19.