Healthy success: Vietnam is world’s second most successful country in handling CVOVID-19 pandemic

Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam Insider)

HANOI: Vietnam is Asia’s most successful country in handling the coronavirus pandemic and the world’s second best, a performance index published by the Sydney-based Lowy Institute indicates.

The COVID Performance Index – Deconstructing Pandemic Responses showed that countries in Asia-Pacific proved the most successful in dealing with the pandemic, while Europe and the Americas were “quickly overwhelmed” by the rapid spread of COVID-19.

The Asia-Pacific success with fewer reported cases and deaths both in aggregate and per capita terms included New Zealand (1), Vietnam (2), Taiwan (3), Thailand (4), Australia (8) and Sri Lanka (10) on the list of 98 countries evaluated in the 36 weeks that followed their hundredth confirmed case of COVID-19 using data available to Jan. 9, 2021.

Cyprus (5), Rwanda (6), Iceland (7), Australia (8) and Latvia (9) were the other countries in the top ten.

At the other end of the spectrum, Brazil (98), Mexico (97), Columbia (96), Iran (95) and the US (94) closed the pile.

The institute said that the calculations included the number of confirmed cases, confirmed deaths, confirmed cases per million people, confirmed deaths per million people, confirmed cases as a proportion of tests and tests per thousand people.

According to the report, Europe registered the greatest improvement over time of any region — with most countries there at one point exceeding the average performance of countries in the Asia–Pacific — before succumbing to a second, more severe, wave of the pandemic in the final months of 2020.

The report was published as world coronavirus cases surpassed 100 million with the death toll exceeding 2 million.

“Levels of economic development or differences in political systems between countries had less of an impact on outcomes than often assumed or publicized,” the institute said in its analysis.

However, “in general, countries with smaller populations, cohesive societies, and capable institutions have a comparative advantage in dealing with a global crisis such as a pandemic.”