New Zealand is the top performer in the management of Covid-19, while Australia ranks eighth, according to an index published today by the Lowy Institute.
The Lowy Institute’s new interactive feature – the Covid Performance Index – looks at how countries and territories have performed in response to the pandemic.
It is based on compelling data for the 36 weeks that followed each 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 percentage of tests and tests per thousand people.
Of the nearly 100 jurisdictions with publicly available and comparable data in these categories, New Zealand ranks highest. It is followed by Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, Cyprus, Rwanda, Iceland and Australia.
According to the researchers, China was not included in the rankings due to a lack of publicly available data on tests, but South Korea is 20th, Japan 45th, the United Kingdom 66th, Indonesia 85th and the United States 94th, with Brazil in the last place at 98th.
“Although the outbreak of the coronavirus began in China, countries in the Asia-Pacific were, on average, the most successful in curbing the pandemic,” the interactive says. “On the other hand, the rapid spread of Covid-19 along the main areas of globalization quickly overwhelmed Europe and then the United States.”
The researchers, Alyssa Leng and Hervé Lemahieu, say smaller countries with less than ten million people “were more mobile than the majority of their larger counterparts in dealing with the health emergency for most of 2020″ – but developmental levels or differences in political systems ” has less of an impact on the outcomes than is often accepted or published ”.
You can explore the interactive and find out more here about how they cracked the data.