Among countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Latvia is second after South Korea when it comes to controlling COVID-19 pandemic, according to a study by OECD experts.
Lithuania and Estonia are fourth and fifth on the list consisting of 33 out of 36 OECD member states.
All Asian countries and countries of the Pacific region are doing fairly well as well – Australia is ranked third, Japan is sixth and New Zealand is tenth.
Eastern Europe is doing better than Western Europe and Northern Europe is doing better than South Europe. Norway is ranked tenth among Nordic countries, Denmark is twelfth, Finland is fourteenth and Sweden is twenty second.
USA, Italy, France, Britain, Belgium and Spain are at the end of the list.
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According to experts, major OECD countries in which population numbers exceed 50 million had to face many infection cases imported from travelling Chinese tourists and their own tourists returning from China at the beginning of the pandemic , and they did not adopt strict border control measures on their external borders and within their territories.
To compare countries, experts used epidemic control index, which was calculated based on three indexes – death rates per million residents, factual speed of the spread of the disease and epidemic control efficiency between 4 March and 12 May.
At the same time, experts comment that it is hard to compare death indexes because different countries have different standards for measuring it. There is also a shortage of exact, comparable data on infection rates.