The Lowy Institute for International Policy (LIP), an Australian think tank, has compiled the performance of 98 countries in terms of the number of confirmed cases, deaths and detection rates of Wuhan pneumonia (COVID-19). The best performing country was New Zealand, while Taiwan ranked third.
The Lowy Institute for International Policy on Thursday released data on the world’s Epidemic prevention performance. The top 10 countries in terms of cumulative number of confirmed cases, number of confirmed cases per million people, number of confirmed deaths, number of confirmed deaths per million people, ratio of confirmed cases to number of people tested, and number of people tested per 1,000 people were New Zealand, Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, Cyprus, Rwanda, Iceland, Australia, Latvia, and Sri Lanka. Latvia, and Sri Lanka.
The United States, with over 25 million confirmed cases, is ranked 94th, India, with over 10 million confirmed cases, is ranked 86th, and the United Kingdom, with the highest number of deaths in Europe, is ranked 66th. However, China has not announced the number of confirmed cases to the public, but the Lowy Institute said that China is not included in this ranking due to the lack of public data on China.
The Lowe Institute analyzes that differences in economic development levels or political systems between countries actually have less impact on pandemic outcomes than is commonly perceived, and that countries with smaller, more cohesive populations and strong institutions have a comparative advantage in dealing with global crises like pandemics. Herve Lemahieu, a researcher at the Lowell Institute, noted that pandemic preparedness performance shows that countries with fewer than 10 million people are more responsive than most large countries in dealing with medical emergencies.
Lemahieu said the data also disproves the argument that “dictatorships are more effective than democracies in dealing with crises” because while dictatorships mobilize and blockade faster and are more effective at mobilizing resources, they have trouble sustaining a blockade for long periods of Time. While democracies are less responsive in the early stages of an epidemic, they gradually improve after the first wave, and in the case of the United States and the United Kingdom, they do not take strict enough precautionary measures.
The top 10 countries include democracies, autocracies and mixed regimes, all of which benefit from having strong institutions at Home. LeMahieu emphasized that the dividing line for an effective crisis response is not the type of regime, but whether citizens trust their leaders and whether those leaders can lead a capable and effective state.
Recent Comments