Covid-19 cases may be on the rise here, but that hasn’t stopped Ireland from being listed as one of the best places to be during the pandemic.
The Bloomberg Covid Resilience ranking has tracked the best and worst countries that are in a “world divided over Covid”.
In the final and final installment of the rankings, South Korea came in first as the best place to be during the pandemic, followed by the United Arab Emirates in second place and Ireland in third place.
The top five was completed with Norway in fourth and Saudi Arabia in fifth.
Bloomberg began compiling the rankings in November 2020, using “a series of data points to capture a monthly snapshot of how the world’s largest economies were coping with this one-time health crisis.”
Data points include the level of vaccination among the population, severity of lockdowns and flying capacity.
It said the top five countries are those that “put the pandemic in the rear view most effectively, with the fewest scars”.
“They have been able to reopen their borders and economies without a substantial spike in deaths.”
It said the top countries have accepted that Covid-19 is here to stay, have aggressively vaccinated the most vulnerable and are trying to resume economic and social activity “as if it were 2019”.
Bloomberg said the top-performing countries were able to implement this approach, as most are wealthy, able to pay for vaccines, and have the logistics to deliver these vaccines to their populations.
“Then there’s the elusive yet powerful factor of societal trust and cohesion,” he said, pointing out that the populations of these countries more readily adhered to social distancing guidelines and mask-wearing guidelines, and signed up for vaccination in greater numbers.
“Obviously, when the population trusts public health messages, you’re going to see more resilience,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore.
“If you have places where the science is trusted, where this isn’t seen as a political problem, but as a public health problem, then you’re going to have much better results.”
Meanwhile, the countries at the bottom of the Covid Resilience Ranking are largely unchanged since last month.
At the bottom of the list and the worst place to be during the pandemic was Russia in 53rd place. Close to the front was Taiwan on 52nd, mainland China on 51st, Pakistan on 50th and Hong Kong on 49th.
Hong Kong, Taiwan and China kept cases and deaths low at the start of the pandemic, but these started to grow as the virus mutated into increasingly contagious strains.
Taiwan and Hong Kong have seen death rates rise as Omicron has developed, while China has put in place tighter restrictions to bring the number of cases down to zero, but has in turn seen a massive decline in its economic growth.
World Health Organization director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in February that the “acute” phase of the pandemic could end this year if about 70 percent of the world is vaccinated by mid-2022.
Currently, about 67 percent of the world’s population has received a single dose and 61 percent are fully vaccinated, according to Our World in Data.