A little more on New Zealand’s Covid-19 response.
The Lowy Institute in Australia ranked the response of 100 countries to the COvid-19 pandemic: New Zealand was number 1.
The Top 10 was: New Zealand, Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, Cyprus, Rwanda, Iceland, Australia, Latvia, Sri Lanka.
As Daniel Hurst reported in the Guardian:
The Lowy Institute’s new interactive feature – the Covid Performance Index – looks at how countries and territories 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.
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.
“Although the coronavirus outbreak started in China, countries in the Asia-Pacific, on average, proved the most successful at containing the pandemic,” the interactive says.
“By contrast, the rapid spread of Covid-19 along the main arteries of globalisation quickly overwhelmed first Europe and then the United States.”
Researchers Alyssa Leng and Hervé Lemahieu say 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”.
In general, countries with smaller populations, cohesive societies, and capable institutions have a comparative advantage in dealing with a global crisis such as a pandemic, Leng and Lemahieu said.
American political scientist Francis Fukuyama has argued the dividing line in effective crisis response has not been regime type
but whether citizens trust their leaders, and whether those leaders preside over a competent and effective state
You can explore the Lowy Institute interactive, and find out more about how they crunched the data here.
