I saw this article about Singapore taking the #1 spot in Covid Resilience Rankings, and I don’t get it
The top three countries — Singapore, New Zealand, and Australia — provide their residents “a pre-pandemic quality of life” with the exception of international travel, according to Bloomberg
Fair enough. And according to this table, Taiwan falls short of those 3 because of 1 monthly fatality rate (2.4% vs 0%) and because of vaccination coverage. I don’t buy that - given that Taiwan’s resilience throughout the entire pandemic has been exemplary by comparison.
I’m going to send this ranking to my friends in Singapore and shock them.
It’s presumably just attributable to the limitations of the metric used and the fact that Taiwan is an outlier. The writers needed to come up with some dumb metric to use in their dumb article to get advertising money, so they chose a set of parameters and weighted them in a manner that works for 99% of the countries in the world but not Taiwan. Probably not helped by Taiwan’s low vaccination coverage either (although it of course makes sense that this would be included in the overall score).
I wouldn’t put much value in these kinds of lists, personally (like the “best countries to live” lists that appear every so often).
Each of the 11 data indicators are aggregated through the “max-min” method, which is used to convert metrics expressed in different scales into a common one, while maintaining the relative distance between values.
All the indicators are scored on a 0-100 scale, with 100 (blue) indicating the best performance and zero (orange) the worst. The rest fall in between, scaled by their distance from one another. The final Bloomberg Resilience Score is the average of a place’s performance across the 11 indicators, equally weighted.
The final score given to each place is a relative measurement on a given date. That score shouldn’t be compared in isolation to the economy’s previous scores as the max-min ceiling and floor values change in every update.
The Ranking is updated once a month.
So I’m guessing that’s the explanation - a rock-bottom score for vaccination coverage leading to a slightly lower overall score. (Another contributing factor is presumably the limited number of tests that Taiwan does.)
Hardly. This logic only works if it’s guaranteed that there will never be any community spread, which isn’t feasible indefinitely when people are arriving every day.
“Best place to be during a pandemic”
Australia/NZ love their lockdowns.
Only a clown would consider a place in lockdown to be one of the best places to be.