Best and worst countries on COVID-19 response

[Former President tack50]

It's worth Google translating this article, because researchers at the University of Southampton and Reporters sans frontières have estimated that if China had a free press, the number of people infected could have been almost 90% lower. And the world would have gained precious time in responding to the disease.

Worth thinking about before you jump to quickly to praising China's response.

Libertarians, especially, seem to be shilling hard on every front that either the virus is not that bad in the West, or that WELL AKSHUALLY it's all China's fault, and people are dying on the streets here and the government is just lying. Why? Because whether you like liberal democracy or not, this is clearly an example of a time when autocracy seems to work better, and there will almost certainly be a global increase in support for "statism" in its many different forms.

While I agree that, regrettably, authoritarianism will probably rise in support (even more), the reason China performed relatively well (assuming numbers are to be believed which is a whole other story) is certainly not authoritarianism.

The successes of South Korea and Japan, both liberal democracies with press freedom and the other perks that Western countries have prove that an authoritarian government is not necessary to contain a pandemic.

If anything I would argue the reason is less of a political and more of a cultural one, with broadly East Asian cultures being more effective at stopping the pandemic for various reasons. Might sound a bit racist but I think it is a better explanation than a political one.

[Former President tack50]

Honestly this is a simpler answer than what people think. Just go to per capita stats and do a mixture of deaths/capita and cases/capita

Here is my very rough methodology. Take the world average of cases/Capita and deaths/capita. Then see what percentage above or below the world average each country is (for example if the world average is 100 deaths and a country has 200 deaths, that means it gets 200%). Then average the 2 numbers for the deaths and cases above the world average.

Doing this very rough methodology you get the following list of the top 20 worst responses (I'll exclude microstates and places which are not really countries or are unrecognized and put them in italics):

Andorra
Faroe Islands
San Marino
Monaco
1 Luxembourg
Gibraltar
2 Peru
3 USA
4 Spain
5 United Arab Emirates
6 Bahrain
Channel Islands
7 Italy
8 Chile
9 Iceland
10 Brazil
Falkland Islands
11 UK
12 Sweden
13 France
Cayman Islands
14 Panama
15 Ireland
16 Mexico
Sint Maarten
17 Bolivia
18 Colombia
19 Netherlands
20 Ecuador

On that note, here would be the top 20 best responses to COVID, which is an slightly more surprising set of countries:

3 way tie at 0: Vatican City, Seychelles, Eritrea

1 Tanzania
2 Timor-Leste
Western Sahara
3 Burundi
4 Papua New Guinea
5 Dominica
6 Burkina Faso
7 Democratic Republic of Congo
8 Myanmar
9 Angola
10 Niger
Taiwan
11Mozambique
12 Ivory Coast
13 Chad
14 South Sudan
Anguilla
15 Laos
16 Somalia
17 Cambodia
Macao
18 Guinea
19 Syria
20 Tajikistan

You could add testing to the mixture as well I guess if you want to account for that, but I have not done that for now.

Anyways my comments:

1: Tfw Syria and Somalia are doing better on covid than your own country

2: As expected, underdeveloped 3rd world countries seem to be the ones doing better, despite the initial fears of covid wrecking Africa that has not happened (if anything, the opposite is true)

3: Much more surprisingly, both the Chinese "special zone" of Macao; as well as the de facto independent country of Taiwan are doing quite well; and these are not dirt poor places of the world but rather more "middle income" ones. I wonder why they did so well; maybe Jachind can explain it somehow?

[Former President tack50]

Worst: America. Is this even a question?

Yes, because Brazil exists.

Actually, per my methodology, Brazil only just barely cracks the top 10 (507% of world average in cases/1M, 59% of world average in deaths/1M) while the US are getting the bronze medal (500% in cases/1M, 224% in deaths/1M)

[Former President tack50]

It seems likely that measuring by cases is misleading because if you don't/can't test then you'll only find the most deadly cases. Also, not all cases are equal: considering the drastic difference in deaths between New Jersey or New York and Texas, California or Florida despite comparable case loads.

The best way to measure success would be to average the death rate with the relative change in GDP growth.

Judging from his post I am pretty sure tack50 is not interested in measuring the economic response.

Yeah, I am not taking into account the economic response in that metric. That is certainly something that could be measured as well but I have not done it for now

Really it's just a rough average of the "deaths per capita" and "cases per capita" measures, compared to the worldwide average. I could include testing however

[Former President tack50]

Where does Peru fall in all of this proportionately?

Despite the lack of press about it, Peru has the 2nd worst COVID response anywhere on Earth based on the raw numbers (only behind tiny Luxembourg).

It could either be a "too much reporting" issue (kinda like how Belgium's numbers are sort of inflated) or they could genuinely have screwed up very badly.