Iceland Ranks Seventh in Fight Against COVID-19

According to a COVID Performance Index, published  by the Lowy Institute , Iceland ranks seventh in the world in terms of effectively responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Lowy Institute is anindependent, nonpartisan international policy think tank located in Sydney, Australia.

New Zealand is at the top of the list, performing the best in the fight against the pandemic, followed by Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, Cyprus, Rwanda and Iceland.

The institute explored how 98 countries with publicly available and comparable data on the virus have managed the pandemic to date following their 100th confirmed case of COVID-19.

It sorts countries into categories — by regions, political systems, population size, and economic development — to determine whether significant variations exist between different types of states in the handling of the pandemic.

To gauge the relative performance of countries at different points in the pandemic, six measures of COVID-19 were tracked. The period examined spans the 36 weeks that followed every country’s 100th confirmed case of the disease, using data available to January 9, 2021.

Fourteen-day rolling averages of new daily figures were calculated for confirmed cases, confirmed deaths, confirmed cases per million people, confirmed deaths per million people, confirmed cases as a proportion of tests, and for tests per 1,000 people.

Smaller countries with populations of fewer than 10 million people consistently outperformed their larger counterparts throughout 2020. Not surprisingly, countries with higher per capita incomes had more resources available to fight the COVID-19 pandemic and performed better on average than developing countries for most of the crisis to date.

You can view the entire list of countries and read more about how the index was created here .