Comparing corona

As I write (the weekend of May 30-31), the UK’s death toll from the Covid-19 pandemic has reached 38,489. Even the rightwing Financial Times regards this figure as an under-estimate, and says the actual toll is 60,300.

The Murdoch-owned Sky News reports that the UK’s population-adjusted COVID19 death toll has now overtaken Italy’s. The prime minister’s office used to include this comparison in its daily slideshow on the pandemic, but stopped doing so a couple of weeks ago – anything to avoid making the Tories look bad.

The UK’s death toll is now the highest in Europe, and the highest in the world after the US.

The pandemic not being over, certainty is in no way possible about outcomes, though even a rule-of-thumb approach indicates that some countries and regions have responded better to the pandemic than others.

The countries or regions generally praised for having the best practices in their responses are Germany, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Indian state of Kerala. On the other hand, the UK, US, and Brazil are widely regarded as having delivered messy and hugely incompetent responses.

Kerala is an especially interesting case – with a population of 35 million, it had, as of the end of May, 1088 cases of Covid-19, nine deaths, and no community transmission. There have been more fatalities among Keralites residing in the US (29)!

Kerala has a GDP per capita of only $2,688. By contrast, the UK (with double Kerala’s population, GDP per capita of $40,450) has reported just below 40,000 deaths, while the US (10 times Kerala’s population, GDP per capita of $62,308) has over 100,000 deaths, and both countries have rampant community transmission.

Of the 28 Indian states, Kerala has the highest Human Development Index (HDI), 0.784 in 2018 (0.712 in 2015); the highest literacy rate, 93.91 percent in the 2011 census; the highest life expectancy, 77 years (exceeding that of Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Alabama, West Virginia, Mississippi, and the District of Columbia); the lowest infant mortality; and the highest sex ratio, 1,084 women per 1,000 men.

Since its formation in 1956, Kerala has for most of that time been ruled by a democratically elected communist party, with a focus on land distribution, educational reforms, and a decentralized public health system.

Three days after reading about the virus outbreak in China, and before Kerala had its first case of Covid-19, Kerala’s health minister K K Shailaja met with her rapid response team. To quote The Guardian: “....By the time the first case arrived, on 27 January, via a plane from Wuhan, the state had already adopted the World Health Organization’s protocol of test, trace, isolate and support".

Excerpted from: 'The UK Compared With Other Countries on the Pandemic'.

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