Lowy Institute (whatever that is) has made this very cool interactive and real-time web page of Covid Perfomance Index. The performance indicators are:
Each country is then given a score from 0 to 100 and ranked.
At the top is NZ with 94.4 points, then Viatnam and Taiwan as 2 and 3.
Sorry for all the pictures, no way copy text from that site.
It’s interesting that whether the country is democratic or authoritarian doesn’t seem to mean much, if anything at all. Yet, the performance of a country is solely decided by politics, slightly biased by population size.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
For all that, it is MUCH easier for everyone if the government or the law sais “STAY HOME” or else. People are great in manufacturing reasons to do things they want to do despite or not to do things they don’t like. Humans are not Vulcans, their rationale is switched off most of the time. Otherwise, why would we have constant discussions about what “should be done” on a reason level but never is?
Why do you keep saying what is better for everyone? Not all people want the government to lock them! Your judgement of what are the desires of others is subjective and is greatly affected by your own opinion. Same for everybody. I personally find that most of the people I know are sceptical about the restrictions.
LeSving – I dont see China on the list.
Valentin – I find in this debate about whether Governments should be judging what is and isnt good for us, it is forgotten this is probably not the motivating factor. Lockdowns are motivated because without, health systems would collapse, and no one could be treated for any medical conditions and people would die in their beds at home in acute suffering in consequence. People shouldnt be sceptical therefore or judge based on anything else other than certainly in the UK at least the simple mathematical evidence is without the current lockdown the NHS would have effectively collapsed, unless by some miracle we dont know about all the modelling were wrong, and if there is some small chance it were, you cant take a chance on the collapse of a health service.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
LeSving – I dont see China on the list.
The site states that “China was not included in this ranking due to a lack of publicly available data on testing.”
Fairly obviously that’s true for many of the countries which are listed!
It’s not a meaningful / useful table. For a start, a low population density will automatically produce a good outcome. Throw in poverty, so people don’t travel much, and it gets even better.
The poor UK and US performance is partly due to an unhealthy (obese, and all the many consequences of that) population. The poor performance of any “free” country is caused by people being, ahem, free, and not easy to lock down. Countries with a recent history of police state government (much of Europe, depending how far back you go) have done better too.
I also think, when the research has been done on this, it will be found that lots of small things make a significant difference.
LeSving wrote:
Lowy Institute (whatever that is) has made this very cool interactive and real-time web page of Covid Perfomance Index. The performance indicators are:
Do you understand why they use confirmed cases and confirmed deaths as absolute number in addition to per million? I think that is a fundamental flaw in their approach as it does nothing else than favoring small countries. “Interestingly” for the only indicator where more is good they only use the ratio and not the absolute number …
Their methodology is to do an average index on the 6 indicators.
So if we assume we just have 2 countries and they are identical in the lower 4 indicators (deaths and cases per million, cases per test and tests per population), they both get 100 points for each of these categories. Now Country A has 1 mio population, country b has 10 mio. Obviously as the ratios are identical therefore country b has ten times the cases of country a so a receives 100 points and b only 10 in these two categories.
Therefore, in their rating country A will end up with 100 points while country b only gets 70. Is that a good indicator?
Sad to say I think this form of data analysis does more harm than good.
It comes across as an absolute table that could very easily be used depending on your POV to support a particular agenda. As Peter says there are so many factors that can either be controlled or not that will effect the result, the result becomes meaningless.
It is rather like testing a drug on 50 healthy and fit people all in their 30’s and promotoing the excellent results that were obtained as evidence of success.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
Valentin – I find in this debate about whether Governments should be judging what is and isnt good for us, it is forgotten this is probably not the motivating factor. Lockdowns are motivated because without, health systems would collapse, and no one could be treated for any medical conditions and people would die in their beds at home in acute suffering in consequence. People shouldnt be sceptical therefore or judge based on anything else other than certainly in the UK at least the simple mathematical evidence is without the current lockdown the NHS would have effectively collapsed, unless by some miracle we dont know about all the modelling were wrong, and if there is some small chance it were, you cant take a chance on the collapse of a health service.
I can’t say about the UK but in many countries, the health systems are far from collapsing. And your answer assumes that the government knows better what is good for people. Not everyone would agree with that.
Peter wrote:
For a start, a low population density will automatically produce a good outcome. Throw in poverty, so people don’t travel much, and it gets even better.
You don’t know that. Show me data to support it 
Seriously, USA has low population density, not to mention Canada. And powerty – Rwanda isn’t known to be a wealthy country. In fact, the data available does not support your claim, period.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
As Peter says there are so many factors that can either be controlled or not that will effect the result, the result becomes meaningless.
Make your own list. Death per capita, tests etc is all available, free of charge. You have to look at the web site. The interesting parts are which factors shows no correlation to corona numbers. That is what the web site shows. No correlation with population density. No correlation with how people travel, no correlation with wealth. Not even correlation with democracy vs authoritarian government. That’s the interesting part. How a country handles this is of course political, but no findings can be seen, only suggestions that somehow:
In today’s FT, David Allen Green makes an interesting legal analysis of the probable ‘advance purchase agreement’ that the EU entered into with Astra-Zeneca. That’s behind a paywall, but his blog shows the ‘workings’ behind it.
In particular he looks at what ‘best efforts’ were defined as, and which part of the agreement they apply to.
In brief: if AZ are just having production problems in the EU, then the ‘best efforts’ clause gets them off the hook. If AZ sent some EU production to another customer, it doesn’t.
