New Delhi (NVI): Brazil’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has been ranked the world’s worst, while New Zealand topped the list, according to an index published by the Lowy Institute today.
Sydney’s Lowy Institute’s new interactive feature – the Covid Performance Index – assessed almost 100 countries and looked at how they have performed in responding to the pandemic.
It’s based on crunching data for the 36 weeks that followed every country’s hundredth confirmed case of Covid-19, based on indicators such as confirmed cases, confirmed deaths, confirmed cases per million people, confirmed deaths per million people, confirmed cases as a proportion of tests, and tests per thousand people.
Of the nearly 100 jurisdictions with publicly available and comparable data in these categories, New Zealand comes out in top place. It’s followed by Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, Cyprus, Rwanda, Iceland and Australia.
The researchers say China was not included in the rankings due to a lack of publicly available data on testing, but South Korea is ranked 20th, Japan 45th, the United Kingdom 66th, Indonesia 85th and the United States 94th, with Brazil in last place at 98th.
India was placed at the 86th spot on the index with more than 10.7 million cases of coronavirus and over 1,53,000 fatalities.
“Although the coronavirus outbreak started in China, countries in the Asia-Pacific, on average, proved the most successful at containing the pandemic,” the interactive said. “By contrast, the rapid spread of Covid-19 along the main arteries of globalisation quickly overwhelmed first Europe and then the United States.”
Researchers added that smaller countries with populations of fewer than 10 million people proved more agile than the majority of their larger counterparts in handling the health emergency for most of 2020 – but development levels or differences in political systems had less of an impact on outcomes than often assumed or publicised.
Overall, cases have now topped 100 million worldwide and some 2.2 people have died from the virus since the outbreak began in December 2019.
-CHK
