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Singapore is the best in the world when it comes to Covid resilience. POFMA on the way for you.
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Covid-19: Singapore overtakes New Zealand as the pandemic's most resilient country
Brittney Deguara08:46, Apr 27 2021FacebookTwitterWhats AppRedditEmail
7-8 minutes
Hong Kong and Singapore announce Covid-19 travel bubble
But it won’t have the same freedoms as the trans-Tasman bubble.
New Zealand is no longer
considered the best place to be during the
Covid-19 pandemic.
While there are no community cases, slower vaccination rates have seen the country drop in
Bloomberg’s Covid Resilience Ranking by 0.1 points.
Singapore, which was previously ranked second, is now the most resilient country during the pandemic, according to the global media company.
The global rankings pull together case data, fatality rates, positive test rates, and vaccination data to calculate the final score. Singapore scored 79.7, New Zealand 79.6.
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“Singapore has already administered vaccines equivalent to cover a fifth of its population, an aspect of pandemic control that other virus eliminators like New Zealand, Australia and Taiwan are lagging on,”
Bloomberg reported.
Ryan Anderson/Stuff
A Covid-19 coronavirus testing station at Mangere, Auckland during the first year of the pandemic.
In Singapore, 19.4 per cent of the population is covered by the vaccine, while New Zealand has one of the lowest vaccination rates with just 1.9 per cent of the population covered.
In the three months since New Zealand began its vaccination campaign, 183,000 doses have been administered.
Group two – which includes aged care residents – have started to receive their doses, while mass vaccinations of the general population in Aotearoa aren’t expected to start until July.
While New Zealand may have dropped from the top spot, its successes were still praised. Bloomberg noted the success of the country’s Covid-19 response – as well as that of Australia’s – has provided a “pre-pandemic quality of life”.
“Now No 2 after a five-month run at the top, New Zealand emphasised communication from the start, with a four-level alert system that gives people a clear picture of how and why the government acts as the outbreak evolves. Like China, Singapore and Australia, it also shut its borders, which has proven a key metric for containment success,” the report read.
Australia, Israel and Taiwan were ranked second, third and fourth, respectively, while Argentina, Poland and Brazil were ranked the three worst countries.
While the latter three places have vaccinated significant portions of their populations,
aggressive variants of the virus have resulted in new infection waves. Poland, for example, has vaccinated 13 per cent of its population, but it’s reported 1377 cases a month per 100,000 with a positive testing rate of 18.9 per cent.
India,
which is enduring a devastating new wave of infections, was ranked 30th with a resilience score of 52.4. Vaccinations cover 5.1 per cent of the population, while 349 cases per 100,000 are reported each month, and there’s a 0.6 per cent monthly fatality rate.
The United States and United Kingdom were ranked 17th and 18th, respectively, with some of the highest vaccination rates – 35.2 per cent and 34.1 per cent – but some of the worst fatality statistics – 1728 and 1881 deaths per million.
Singapore’s Covid-19 response has been
hailed from the outset, thanks, in large part, to its experience with the SARS epidemic in the early 2000s. In the years following the SARS outbreak, Singapore ensured its infrastructure was able to handle future epidemics or pandemics. Isolation hospitals were built, negative pressure rooms were created and legislation was even put in place.
To date, according to data from the World Health Organisation (WHO), Singapore has reported 61,006 confirmed cases and 30 deaths. As of April 5, 1.66 million vaccine doses have been administered.
Vaccinations won’t see the end of this pandemic, but they will help. The possibility of
introducing a booster shot for the Pfizer vaccine has been discussed, and
second-generation vaccines designed to combat new and evolving variants of the virus are already in the works.
Vincent Yu/AP
Singapore has been ranked the best country to be during the pandemic.
Some countries haven’t been able to get their hands on enough vaccine doses to inoculate their populations.
Concerns around vaccine nationalism were raised before mass vaccination campaigns began, and it remains an issue for poorer countries.
A study published in the BMJ found at least 90 per cent of people in 67 low-income countries stand little chance of getting vaccinated this year due to wealthy nations hoarding more doses than needed. Rich countries that home 14 per cent of the world’s population have purchased 53 per cent of the eight most promising vaccines, according to the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a group involving Amnesty International, Frontline AIDS, Global Justice Now, and Oxfam.
Countries are beginning to share, however. The Biden administration in the US recently announced its plans to share around
60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine with other countries.
According to
Bloomberg, Taiwan, Vietnam and Nigeria have some of the lowest vaccination rates with just 0.1 per cent, 0.1 per cent and 0.3 per cent of their populations covered.
The latest Covid Resilience Ranking saw a number of countries move up and down the list. South Africa moved up 16 places after its case-fatality rate almost halved to 4.8 per cent compared to March. Spain jumped 10 spots due to its fatality rate falling from 8.3 per cent to 1.4 per cent.
On the other end of the spectrum, Turkey dropped 19 spots thanks to a dramatic spike in cases and deaths in the last month.
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