New Delhi: India has ranked 86th in a coronavirus performance index out of 98 countries, while New Zealand, Vietnam and Taiwan have been ranked the top three spots, respectively.
The index was conducted by the Australia-based Lowy Institute and was published Thursday. The institute is an independent international policy think tank, located in Sydney.
Publicly available and comparable data on Covid-19 response was used for this index. China was excluded from the list due to lack of publicly available data.
Countries were sorted into broad categories on the basis of regions, political systems, population size, and economic development. This was done to determine the variations that may have existed in the way different nations handled the pandemic.
While some countries managed the coronavirus crisis better than others, the index noted that most countries “outcompeted each other only by degrees of underperformance”.
Levels of economic development and differences in political systems didn’t have as much of an impact on coronavirus response as expected.
The index quoted American political scientist Francis Fukuyama as saying that the dividing line in this crisis won’t be on the basis of regime type “but whether citizens trust their leaders, and whether those leaders preside over a competent and effective state”.
On an average, countries with authoritarian establishments had no “prolonged advantage” in containing the virus. It was found that democracies had “marginally” more success than other governments in their handling of the pandemic.
Further, there was little “discernible difference” in a country’s performance by population size.
“Smaller countries with populations of fewer than 10 million people consistently outperformed their larger counterparts throughout 2020, although this lead narrowed slightly towards the end of the examined period,” said the report.
The index used data, which contained daily figures on these indicators — 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 of these indicators was calculated and each country was given a score from 0 (worst performing) to 100 (best performing).
New Zealand received the highest score at 94.4, followed by Vietnam at 90.8, Taiwan at 86.4, and Thailand at 84.2.
The lowest score was given to Brazil at 4.3. Mexico, Colombia, Iran and the United States too featured among the bottom five countries in terms of performance.
India received a score of 24.3.
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Richer countries were ‘overwhelmed’
It was noted that developing countries were “surprisingly” able to cope with the initial outbreak of the virus in comparison to developed economies.
Richer countries were “overwhelmed” easily when the pandemic first emerged.
“Many governments in developing countries had more lead time — and often a greater sense of urgency — to put in place preventive measures after the scale and severity of the global crisis became known,” said the report.
Also read: How different political systems have handled Covid-19, and India’s response under Modi
The districts of Ahmednagar, Latur and many more in India which are bigger than New Zealand performed far better than New Zealand on every index even without practising apartheid against outsiders.