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COVID-19 performance ranking

Topics Covered: Issues related to Health.

COVID-19 performance ranking:

Context:

The COVID-19 “performance index” has been put together by the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank.

About the Index:

  • The index seeks “to gauge the relative performance of countries”.
  • The index is based on six different indicators, including confirmed cases and deaths per million people and the scale of testing.
  • Publicly available and comparable data on Covid-19 response was used for this index.

How were the countries ranked?

  • Countries were sorted into broad categories on the basis of regions, political systems, population size, and economic development.
  • This was done to determine the variations that may have existed in the way different nations handled the pandemic.
  • China was excluded from the list due to lack of publicly available data.

Performance of various countries:

  1. New Zealand, Vietnam and Taiwan have been ranked the top three spots, respectively.
  2. India has ranked 86th.
  3. Sri Lanka was the best faring nation in South Asia, ranking 10.
  4. Maldives was at 25, Pakistan at 69, Nepal at 70, and Bangladesh at 84.
  5. The lowest score was given to Brazil.
  6. Mexico, Colombia, Iran and the United States too featured among the bottom five countries in terms of performance.

General Observations:

  1. While some countries managed the coronavirus crisis better than others, the index noted that most countries “outcompeted each other only by degrees of underperformance”.
  2. Levels of economic development and differences in political systems didn’t have as much of an impact on coronavirus response as expected.
  3. On an average, countries with authoritarian establishments had no “prolonged advantage” in containing the virus.
  4. It was found that democracies had “marginally” more success than other governments in their handling of the pandemic.
  5. There was little “discernible difference” in a country’s performance by population size.
  6. Smaller countries with populations of fewer than 10 million people consistently outperformed their larger counterparts throughout 2020, although this lead narrowed slightly towards the end of the examined period.

Sources: the Hindu.