New Zealand was ranked as the best performing in managing Covid-19, while Australia is in eighth place, according to an index published today by the Lowy Institute.
The Lowy Institute’s new interactive feature – the Covid Performance Index – analyzes the performance of countries and territories in responding to the pandemic.
It is based on crunch data for the 36 weeks following each country’s 100th confirmed Covid-19 case, 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 ranks first. It is followed by Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, Cyprus, Rwanda, Iceland and Australia.
The researchers say that China was not included in the ranking due to the lack of publicly available data on the tests, but South Korea is in 20th place, Japan in 45th, the United Kingdom in 66th, Indonesia in 85th and the United States United in 94th, with Brazil in last place. 98th.
“Although the coronavirus outbreak started in China, Asia-Pacific countries, on average, were the most successful in containing the pandemic,” says the interactive report. “In contrast, the rapid spread of Covid-19 along the main arteries of globalization quickly overwhelmed Europe first and then the United States.”
Researchers Alyssa Leng and Hervé Lemahieu say that smaller countries with populations of less than 10 million people “proved to be more agile than most of their larger counterparts in dealing with the health emergency for most of 2020” – but the levels of development or differences in political systems “had less of an impact on results than is often assumed or disclosed
You can explore the interactive and find out more about how they processed the data here.