India ranks 86 out of 98 nations in Covid handling: Report

With more than 11 million Covid-19 cases, India has ranked 86 in a performance index of 98 countries for their handling of the Covid19 pandemic, a report said on Thursday. According to the performance index compiled by the Sydney-based Lowy Institute, neighbouring Sri Lanka was in the 10th position in handling the Covid-19 outbreak.

The performance index showed that New Zealand handled the pandemic more effectively than any other country in the world, while Brazil sits at the bottom of the list. New Zealand was closely followed by Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand and Cyprus, while the US was the fifth-worst performing country, The Sydney Morning Herald reported on Thursday.

In the report, the Lowy Institute revealed that smaller populations, cohesive societies and capable institutions were big factors in successfully dealing with the pandemic. The study measured a number of key indicators, including confirmed cases, deaths, cases per million people and deaths per million people.

China was not included in the study because all of its testing rates are not publicly available. With 11,666 new Covid-19 cases getting reported in the last 24 hours on Thursday, India has continued its streak of low singleday cases, even as the overall tally mounted to 1,07,01,193, health officials said.

For the past 21 days, the country has been recording less than 20,000 new infections daily. Also, the death toll remained below the 300mark for the past 31 days. On January 19, India had reported 10,064 new cases, the lowest so far this year. Last year, the lowest was recorded on June 3 at 9,633 cases.

The nationwide immunisation drive began on January 16 after the approval of two Covid vaccines – Covaxin and Covishield – in the country. As many as 23,55,979 beneficiaries have received the first dose of Covid vaccine in the first phase so far.