Brazil is the country with the worst governance during the pandemic, said a study by the Lowy Institute, a study center based in Sydney, Australia.
The country was in last place among 98 countries assessed. Mexico, Colombia, Iran and the United States also scored very low.
At the other end of the list, New Zealand has been named as the country that has best handled the health crisis. Vietnam, Thailand and Taiwan are also among the best examples. New Zealand has all but eradicated the virus through early and drastic border closures, among other actions.
The study took into account six criteria: confirmed cases, deaths, cases and deaths per million inhabitants, diagnoses in relation to the proportion of tests and examinations carried out per thousand people. The investigation focuses on data recorded within 36 weeks after the confirmation of the 100th case in each country.
The survey shows that countries in Asia and the Pacific have, on average, been more successful in containing the pandemic. And he points out that Europe performed well in containing the first wave, but ended up succumbing to the second spike in cases at the end of 2020, in part because of the ease of movement between countries on the continent.
In the Americas, by contrast, the level of cases has remained high over the months, with increases starting in late 2020. Countries in the region have an average score of 33.8 in the fight against the pandemic, Brazil having a score of 4.3, on a scale up to 100.
The Americas index was lower than all others. Africa and the Middle East had an average of 49. Europe, 51, and Asia-Pacific, 58.2.
Brazil has more than 220,000 deaths from the coronavirus and is the country with the most deaths behind the United States, which has lost 429,000 lives so far.
The two most populous countries on the American continent had in common governments of populist leaders – Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump – who actively downplayed the threat of Covid-19, ridiculed the use of masks, opposed lockdown and closure , and were personally infected with the virus.
China – where the virus was first detected in late 2019 – is not included in the list due to a lack of publicly available diagnostic data, according to the authors.
According to the study’s authors, Beijing has aggressively tried to manipulate public perception of how it is handling the epidemic to prove that its authoritarian system is superior to democratic governments.
According to the Lowy Institute, there is no clear winner when it comes to which political system has handled the pandemic best, as in almost all of the countries analyzed the response has been poor. “Some countries have managed the pandemic better than others, but most of them stood out only for their poor performance,” the study notes.
“In general, less populated countries, more united societies and well-formed institutions have a comparative advantage in dealing with global crises such as the pandemic”, reveals the study, on countries with less than 10 million people. ‘inhabitants.
Globally, more than 100 million people have been infected with the virus and nearly 2.2 million have died from it since December 2019, according to official data.