What is Covid Performance Index?

What is the News?

The COVID Performance Index has been released by the Lowy Institute, an Australian think-tank.

Facts:

• COVID Performance Index: The index aims to rank the best-performing countries in their response to the pandemic. It measures the impact of geography, political systems, population size, and economic development on COVID-19 outcomes, for a conclusion.
• Measuring Indicators: To assess the performance of countries, the index tracked six measures of COVID-19 in the 98 countries for which data was available. The six indicators are:
  • Confirmed cases
  • Confirmed deaths
  • Confirmed cases per million people
  • Confirmed deaths per million people
  • Confirmed cases as a proportion of tests
  • Tests per thousand people.
• An average across indicators was then calculated for individual countries in each period and normalized to produce a score from 0 (worst performing) to 100 (best performing).

Rankings:

1. India: India has been ranked at 86 out of 98 countries in the index.
2. Topped by: New Zealand has topped the index followed by Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, and Cyprus.
3. Bottom Countries: The United States has been placed at 94 and Brazil at the bottom of the index.
4. South Asia: Sri Lanka was the best performing nation in South Asia ranking at 10, while the Maldives was at 25, Pakistan at 69, Nepal at 70, and Bangladesh at 84.
5. Region-wise: The countries in the Asia-Pacific region did a better job at controlling the pandemic while Europe and the US were quickly overburdened by the COVID-19 cases.
6. China was not included in the index due to a lack of publicly available data on testing.

Factors that played the role in the Performance of countries:

1. Population size: Smaller countries with fewer than 10 million people consistently outperformed their larger counterparts throughout 2020.
2. Levels of economic development or differences in political systems between countries had less impact on the handling of Covid-19 outcomes.
3. Democratic countries have found to be marginally more successful than other forms of government in their handling of the pandemic.

Source: The Hindu