The Consumer Choice Center, a global consumer advocacy group, launched its first Pandemic Resilience Index to provide an overview of global health system preparedness for the COVID-19 crisis.
The Index looks at 40 countries through the prism of the following factors: vaccination approval, its drive, and time lags that have put brakes on it, critical care bed capacity, and mass testing.
Commenting on the findings, the authors Fred Roeder, CCC’s Managing Director and CCC’s Research Manager Maria Chaplia, said: “Countries’ resilience were ranked as highest, above average, average, below average, and lowest. The United Arab Emirates as a country that managed to quickly kick off the vaccination campaign vaccinated over 50 percent of its population and extensive testing tops the ranking.”
The UAE kicked off the vaccination rollout less than 10 days earlier than the EU, but its performance has been significantly better. The UK and the US (53 and 45 doses per 100 people respectively) follow the UAE. The remainder of the countries analysed, are substantially behind the UAE.
At the same time, the UAE has one of the lowest numbers of ICUs, but with an average of over 8 daily new COVID tests per thousand people, it stands out on testing and is way ahead of countries such as Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary, France, Lithuania, or Italy.
“The pandemic has put health systems globally to an emergency test and exposed both their strong and weak sides. In particular, that concerns hospital capacity, planning abilities, and the existence of a regulatory system that is able to act fast and efficiently when it comes to testing and vaccination, among other things. Moving forward, we hope our Index will help policymakers identify weak spots in our health systems so we can be better prepared for future crises,” Fred Roeder, the Managing Director of the Consumer Choice Center, said.
Read the summary here.
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