The COVID-19 pandemic forced many (if not all) countries to resort to extreme interventions to manage the spread of the Coronavirus. However, most of these spending are not explicitly considered as health expenditures in typical National Health Accounts (NHA) estimates. As such, estimating health spending by employing the conventional expenditure items recorded in NHAs may not reflect the overall financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the healthcare system. We argue that an expanded measure of health spending might be needed to capture the overall impact of the pandemic on health expenditures. We find at least nine COVID-related expenditure groups that are consistent with the accounting principles of the System of Health Accounts framework and should be considered by statistical agencies and health ministries when compiling their respective NHAs.
