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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:
- India: India has been ranked at 86 out of 98 countries in the index.
- Topped by: New Zealand has topped the index followed by Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, and Cyprus.
- Bottom Countries: The United States has been placed at 94 and Brazil at the bottom of the index.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- Population size: Smaller countries with fewer than 10 million people consistently outperformed their larger counterparts throughout 2020.
- Levels of economic development or differences in political systems between countries had less impact on the handling of Covid-19 outcomes.
- Democratic countries have found to be marginally more successful than other forms of government in their handling of the pandemic.
Source: The Hindu
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