Final Score on Who Handled COVID-19 Best

 

There is no perfect way to measure which government did best in managing the COVID-19 pandemic.  But with 48 full months of data from January 20, 2020 to January 27, it is now possible to score which area did best across the whole marathon.  For example, Hong Kong was an early sprinter getting an A+ and then faltering in vaccinating seniors and withstanding Omicron variant.  Other jurisdictions fumbled the exit ramp from Zero Covid-type policies to opening their economies. 

 

Because testing rates varied, a measure like COVID cases, hospitalizations, or deaths could cover up a lot of hidden illness and deaths in places that could not or did not test as much as others.  This post uses Cumulative Excess Mortality numbers drawn from Our World In Data  (OWID) which were drawn from The Economist.  OWID published data for all jurisdictions regardless of how good the estimates were. I advise against making distinctions based on fuzzy data. The Table here filtered out all places where the SD was >0.33 times as big as the excess deaths statistic. Then the reports are sorted into quintiles. If a country is not listed here, it is because their vital statistics data are too imprecise to allow a good estimate of excess deaths—that leaves out China and India, sorry. 

 

Cumulative Excess Mortality from January 2020-January 2024 

for Jurisdictions where Mort/SD >3 in Five Quintiles

 


 The score sheet confirms A’s for three of the Asian Tigers-- Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan—and a B for Hong Kong at 236 cumulative excess deaths per 100,000.  Gulf states did well with Qatar at 69 coming in second overall. Surprises among the A’s include Mongolia, Costa Rica, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan.  United States is in the D category at 406 and Russia is the worst of the F’s at 1,125.    My hope is to get countries who have not started post-COVID commissions to recover from reflection deficit disorder and ask why they did well or how they could get better.  Please leave a comment if you notice something interesting. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Asset-Demiology: Public Health's Best Old Idea is the Key to Rebuild Trust

Image
Asset- demiology is a neologism that does not come up in Google (yet) 1 .  Sound it out—the “ ology ” of peoples ’ assets and strengths.  It is the logical comp anion , but neglected anti-thesis of the usual approach to health.     Health care work is all about deficits .  The work of a doctor, whether human or robot, is to transform a living breathing human into a diagnosis, problem list and treatment plan. Medical s tudents and interns are socialized to walk out of the treatment room and recite to their supervisors all the deficits and problems they uncovered.  There is no place in a standard medical record to actually list a patient’s strengths and capabilities.   The AI-training sets for robot ic medical algorithms have no way to learn the clinical relevance of patients’ strengths. To a doctor , patient=problem list .   Public health has the same pessimistic vibe.     A deficit focus has rubbed off on public healt...
Read more

Watched but Not Seen

  Among the Zulu people of South Africa the traditional greeting is “Sawubona” literally “I see you”.   Contrast that to the English, “How are you?” -- literally a demand for an evaluation.  Evaluations, peer reviews, and performance reviews can be friendly or not.   Jeremy Bentham deserves partial credit for their dark side. Jeremy Bentham thought prisons should be designed around a central panopticon , a tower that would allow the guards to watch every prisoner around the clock to deter mischief.    Modern philosophers like Michel Foucault see panopticons as pervasive in modern society–we are all under the surveillance of others and we all stay on guard to conform. Performance is quantified on scales that are tied to carrots and sticks. The numbers have a hard time saying full sentences about who we are and how we matter.   Throughout the year the sense that one is constantly being watched by a corporate evaluator leads to the stress of chronic...
Read more