The COVID-19 Response: The Vital Role of the Public Health Professional - Chapter 5 Measuring the impact of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has had major direct impacts on health, including hundreds of millions of cases and nearly five million deaths as of October 2021. Advances in data availability, informatics, visualization, and modeling have made it relatively simple to track the number of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths across the course of the pandemic. More difficult to measure are the many indirect impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the response to it. Canceled medical appointments, missed routine screenings, disruptions to routine immunization schedules, and interruptions to critical preventative health services like childhood lead screening have all occurred as a result of the pandemic and the global public health and healthcare response to it. In addition to the impacts on access to healthcare and public health essential services, the COVID-19 pandemic has had major impacts on employment, childcare, food security, and mental health that have direct and indirect effects on health now and for many years into the future.