An earlier AHIP report estimated that the direct costs of COVID-19 treatment for 2020 and 2021 would be between $56 and $556 billion depending upon rate of infection.

Revised reporting commissioned by America's Health Insurance Plans projects lowered costs estimates for hospitalizations associated with COVID-19, even as the per patient costs for those admissions rise.

Related: COVID-19 and the uninsured: Up to 2 million hospitalizations and $42 billion in costs

The report, conducted by Wakely Consulting Group, updates its March 30 report to reflect new data on the cost of the pandemic, utilization of healthcare and the effect of deferred treatment. The earlier report estimated that the direct costs of COVID-19 treatment for 2020 and 2021 would be between $56 billion and $556 billion depending upon rate of infection.

The new numbers also reflect a wide range of potential costs between $30 billion and $547 billion.

Source: Wakely Report

But they are offset by the projected savings due to individuals deferring treatment for other conditions; the costs for 2020 and 2021 are estimated to drop by between $76 billion and $216 billion.

Source: Wakely Report

The report, published June 8, noted that the true national infection rate was and remains unknown due to wide variations in testing, but said some projections posit a 3.5% infection rate.

The researchers therefore crafted their projections at the lower end reflect a 10% infection rate, which "represents a scenario in which there is an ongoing infection in both 2020 and 2021 but without significant spikes."

Under the 10% scenario, costs for both years would run between $30 billion and $92 billion. Positing a 20% infection rate resulted in projected costs between $60.2 billion and $182.2 billion for the same period.

At the top end, a high infection rate of 60% would result in costs between $180 billion to $546.6 billion.

"While the cost for diagnostic testing is implicit in our inpatient and outpatient assumptions for those infected, we have not included the potential for large scale testing costs into the model," the authors wrote. "Several pieces of research have called for large scale population testing to limit the spread of the virus."

The report noted that despite increase healthcare costs due to the pandemic, insurers have also experienced in drop in non-COVID related claims because many people have deferred treatment for those issues, "whether because of formal governmental rules or because of concerns over the virus."

The study's authors noted that it was based on data available on or before May 10, and conceded that its results span a wide array of possible impacts.

"We acknowledge the astonishingly broad range of potential outcomes, in total, by geographic region within the United States, and by health insurance line of business," they wrote. "Our analyses rely, in part, on rapidly evolving and diverse data sets and epidemiological studies from around the world.

"Wide variation in variables such as data quality, testing availability and prioritization protocol, demographics, smoking incidence, timing, and comprehensiveness of intervention measures (e.g. social distancing, lockdowns, etc.), reported hospitalization rates and lengths of stay, hospitalizations requiring intensive care unit ("ICU") services, health care system capacity and labor/supply constraints, the availability and efficacy of temporary health care facilities, and case fatality rates by country/region, to name a few, make it impractical to put forth precise cost projections over two years," it said.

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