ISAS South Asia Scan

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn attention to the capacities of national healthcare systems to tackle the pandemic. These capacities are determined by the access of the systems to critical medical items. The latter comprise medical equipment, chemicals and personal protective bodywear. Very few national healthcare systems in the world are self-sufficient in all these three categories. Given the scale and rapid progress of COVID-19 infections, the healthcare systems in South Asia have repeatedly experienced inadequacies in the availability of these critical medical items.
  
This South Asia Scan is an attempt to study the imports of critical medical items by the South Asian region. It reveals insights on specific import dependencies across the items and also helps to identify countries that are important sources of imports for the region.