Study: PH ranks 79th out of 98 in pandemic response

JABBED TOGETHER Barangay officials await their turns at a vaccination simulation in a Manila public school on Thursday. —RICHARD A. REYES

MANILA, Philippines — A study has ranked the Philippines 79th out of 98 nations for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, putting it well behind its Asian neighbors.

The study released by Australian think tank Lowy Institute saw the Philippines garnering a low score of 30.6 out of a possible 100 based on six indicators. The only other Southeast Asian country that ranked lower was Indonesia, which was in 85th place. But faring worse than even the Philippines and Indonesia is the United States, ranked 94th with a score of 17.3.

Objective benchmarks

The Lowy Institute measured the COVID-19 response of countries based on their COVID Performance Index, which included indicators such as the number of confirmed cases, confirmed deaths, confirmed cases per million people, confirmed deaths per million people, confirmed cases in proportion to tests, and tests per thousand people.

The 98 countries were evaluated in the 36 weeks that followed the 100th confirmed COVID-19 case in their respective areas, the study said.

The Philippines’ Southeast Asian neighbors Vietnam and Thailand were near the top of the list, scoring 90.8 and 84, respectively.

Vietnam ranked only below New Zealand, which topped the list, while Thailand ranked fourth.

Singapore, Malaysia and Myanmar placed 13th, 16th and 24th, with average scores of 74.9, 71 and 62.3, respectively. The Lowy Institute did not include other Association of Southeast Asian Nations members like Cambodia, Laos, Brunei and Timor-Leste due to the lack of data.

Also missing from the list was China, where the COVID-19 virus originated. The think tank said it could not include China due to a lack of publicly available testing data.

‘Apples to oranges’

Sought for comment, the Department of Health (DOH) said that while it welcomed opportunities to learn from the good practices of other countries, the study failed to properly contextualize the Philippine situation.

“Please note that the pandemic is very dynamic, and the capture of proper context is crucial in assessing the performance of a country,” it said.

According to the DOH, the study’s methodology “did not capture the complex nature of pandemic response.”

“We can’t be comparing apples to oranges. The measures they used did not capture the complex nature of pandemic response, for example, how quickly a country initiates contact tracing [and] readiness of health facilities to address the surges,” it said.