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Healthcare takes centre stage, finally! 155

Figure 4 (Panel a): Proportion of communicable
and non-communicable diseases in India

Source: Global Burden of Diseases (2019)

Figure 4 (Panel b): NCd’s: one among top 10 reasons for deaths

Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation

Better healthcare infrastructure is no insurance against communicable disease

5.13 As the evidence below illustrates (Figure 5), faced with such a devastating pandemic, even

the infrastructure created by greater healthcare spending in the advanced economies could not
deal with the disease burden created by the pandemic. We observe positive correlations between
total number of cases and deaths with respect to health expenditure per capita implying better
health infrastructure. So, better health infrastructure is no guarantee that a country would be
able to deal better with devastating pandemics like COvID-19. As the next health crisis could
possibly be drastically different from COvID-19, the focus must be on building the healthcare
system generally rather than a specific focus on communicable diseases.