UK close to the bottom in league table of coronavirus response

Only Belgium performed worse in the ranking of 21 OECD countries, which gave a score out of four for categories of death toll, healthcare and testing programme.

The UK has ranked close to the bottom of a league table of 21 developed countries when it comes to coronavirus response.

Only Belgium performed worse in the ranking, which gave a score out of four for categories of death toll, healthcare and testing programme.

Scores were adjusted to take pre-existing risk factors into account (share of
older population, obesity prevalence and number of international arrivals).

Those scored were 21 OECD countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Chile, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US).

The UK scored 2.22 which was rated ‘poor’ – level with Italy and Spain, and only doing better than Belgium, which scored 2.11.

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Countries performing the best were New Zealand (3.67), Germany (3.56) and Austria (3.56).

The US was judged to have a ‘good’ response’ with 3.11.

The Economist’s Intelligence Unit carried out the analysis.

Their report says: ‘Belgium, Italy, Spain and the UK record the lowest scores. This
is partly understandable in the case of Italy and Spain: these countries were the first in Europe to be hit by the pandemic and had little time to prepare.

‘However, it is harder to explain the UK’s poor score. The global connectivity of the UK—and especially London—may help to explain its high excess death toll (as at early June, UK statistics show that the number of extra deaths per million people is the second highest in the world, after Spain), but the country had a slower build-up of cases than other European countries and more time to prepare.

‘In addition, Britain’s centralised public healthcare system provided the government with crucial data as to who was most at risk. An insufficiently fast and co-ordinated response, an initial lack of testing capacity, and a decision to suspend track and trace in early March may help to explain why the UK became an outlier.’

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