After being listed for months as the worst country to be in during the coronavirus pandemic, Mexico moved up five places in the latest update to Bloomberg’s “Covid Resilience” rankings.
Mexico had languished at the bottom of the list since the inception of the rankings last November but now ranks 48th out of 53 countries that have been graded on their pandemic response on a monthly basis by the news agency.
Bloomberg said that Mexico had risen in its April rankings “as its virus testing improved.”
The news agency uses a wide range of data to assess where the pandemic is being handled most effectively with the least social and economic disruption. It scores economies of more than $200 billion on 10 indicators, including growth in virus cases, the overall mortality rate, testing capabilities, access to vaccination, the capacity of the local health system, the impact of virus-related restrictions on the economy and freedom of movement.
Mexico’s “Covid Resilience” score this month is 43 out of 100, up from 37.6 in the inaugural rankings and a 12.2 jump compared to January.
Singapore is at the top of the rankings for the first time, dethroning New Zealand, which had been considered the best country to be in during the pandemic since November. The southern Pacific island nation is now in second place, followed by Australia, Israel and Taiwan.
“The tiny city-state [Singapore] has gotten locally-transmitted cases down to near zero thanks to border curbs and a strict quarantine program, allowing citizens to largely go about their everyday lives, even attending concerts and going on cruises,” Bloomberg said.
“At the same time, 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.”
Brazil, which ranks second in the world after the United States for Covid-19 deaths, took Mexico’s place at the bottom of the Bloomberg rankings. Poland now ranks second-last ahead of Argentina, Colombia and Iran.
Mexico’s North American trade partners, the United States and Canada, ranked 17th and 19th respectively.
According to data collated by John Hopkins University, Mexico currently ranks 15th in the world for confirmed case numbers with just under 2.33 million as of Monday. It ranks third for Covid-19 fatalities with 215,113, although the federal government has acknowledged that the real death toll is much higher.
Based on those figures — both case numbers and deaths are widely believed to be significant undercounts due to the low testing rate here — Mexico’s fatality rate is 9.2 per 100 cases, the highest among the 20 countries currently most affected by the pandemic, according to John Hopkins. The mortality rate in Mexico is 168.6 per 100,000 people, the 19th highest rate in the world.
Mexico’s improvement in the Bloomberg rankings comes as the coronavirus situation ameliorates here, at least based on official numbers.
The federal Health Ministry reported a daily average of 3,486 cases during the first 26 days of April, a 29% decline compared to March and a 75% drop compared to January, the worst month of the pandemic.
A daily average of 458 Covid-19 fatalities have been reported so far this month, a 19% decrease compared to March and a 56% decline compared to January.
According to Bloomberg, Mexico ranks 32nd out of the 53 major economies for vaccine coverage. As of Monday night, about 16.5 million vaccine doses had been administered in Mexico, mainly to health workers and seniors, although the number of vaccinated teachers is now rising quickly as authorities seek to reopen schools more than a year after they closed.
The federal government said in February that it expected to receive more than 100 million vaccine doses by the end of May, but that prediction now appears exceedingly unlikely to come true. Only 22.1 million doses have arrived to date.
Bloomberg said that “vaccine supply in most places around the world is grossly inadequate, with richer nations like the U.S. and Japan snapping up stock of the highly sought-after and effective mRNA shots,” namely those made by Pfizer and Moderna.
“The fate of tenuous steps toward reopening by some countries, and the race between vaccination and virus variants, will be the key focus for the Covid Resilience Ranking into May,” the news agency said.
Mexico News Daily
