Shortages of essential supplies used to prevent, diagnose, and treat COVID-19 have been a global concern, and price speculation and hikes may have negatively influenced access. This study identifies variability in prices of products acquired through government-driven contracts in Ecuador during the early pandemic response, when the highest mortality rates were registered in a single day. Data were obtained from the National Public Procurement Service (SERCOP) database between March 1 and July 31, 2020. A statistical descriptive analysis was conducted to extract relevant measures for commonly purchased products, medical devices, pharmaceutical drugs, and other goods. Among the most frequently purchased products, the greatest amounts were spent on face masks (US$4.5 million), acetaminophen (US$2.2 million), and reverse transcriptase quantitative polymerase chain reaction assay kits (US$1.8 million). Prices varied greatly, depending on each individual contract and on the number of units purchased; some were exceptionally higher than their market value. Compared with 2019, the mean price of medical examination gloves increased up to 1,307%, acetaminophen 500 mg pills, up to 796%, and oxygen flasks, 30.8%. In a context of budgetary constraints that actually required an effective use of available funds, speculative price hikes may have limited patient access to health care and the protection of the general population and health care workers. COVID-19 vaccine allocations to privileged individuals have also been widely reported. Price caps and other forms of regulation, as well as greater scrutiny and transparency of government-driven purchases, and investment in local production, are warranted in Ecuador for improved infectious disease prevention.

The awarding of public procurement processes is one of the main causes of corruption in governments, due to the fact that in many cases, contracts are awarded to previously agreed suppliers (favouritism); for this selection, the qualification parameters of a process play a fundamental role, seeing as due to their manipulation, bidders with high prices win, causing prejudice to the state. This study identifies processes with anomalies and generates a model for detecting possible corruption in the assignment of process qualification parameters in public procurement. A multi-phase model was used (the identification of anomalies and generation of the detection model), which uses different algorithms, such as clustering (K-Means), Self-Organizing map (SOM), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). SOM was used to determine the level of influence of each rating parameter, K-Means to create groups by clustering, semi-supervised learning with SVM and PCA to generate a model to detect anomalies in the processes. By means of a case study, four groups of processes were obtained, highlighting the presence of the group “null economic offer” where the values for the economic offer do not exceed 1%, and a greater weight is given to other qualification parameters, which include direct contracting. The processes in this cluster are considered anomalous. Following this methodology, a semi-supervised learning model is built for the detection of anomalies, which obtains an accuracy of 95%, allowing the detection of procedures where the aim is to benefit a particular supplier by means of the qualification assignment parameters.