The COVID-19 Global Response Index

As governments around the world continue to grapple with the pandemic, FP Analytics has developed the COVID-19 Global Response Index to track countries’ responses to the novel coronavirus according to key metrics. While country rankings have been published by other organizations and publications, the Index is the first effort to track national leaders’ responses in critical policy areas, including public health directives, financial responses, and fact-based public communications—and is doing so on an ongoing basis.

FPA’s COVID-19 Global Response Index covers a set of 36 countries, including G20 nations as well as several other developing and middle-income countries that experts and epidemiologists have identified as having notable experiences with respect to COVID-19. This group represents a set of countries for which there is reasonably robust data availability as well as global geographic distribution and socio-economic and political diversity. While notable gaps in data and reporting remain, this Index endeavors to provide a framework to track government responses across multiple categories and will continue to be refined and expanded as more consistently tracked and disaggregated datasets become available and understanding of the virus can inform further Index weighting.

The Index and associated country profiles are based on global data tracked from December 31, 2019 through March 15, 2021. They are intended to illuminate major actions taken by governments to contain the spread of the virus, identify areas for improvement, and highlight promising practices to inform countries’ ongoing responses. The Index includes policy choices and actions across three (3) categories and produces a composite score. The composite score reflects actions taken not only to contain the virus, but to provide financial support amid the global financial shock, and ongoing, fact-based information to the public. Data availability and reporting continues to be a challenge; nonetheless, this project seeks to provide a more holistic view of countries’ responses to the pandemic across distinct variables. The data is supplemented with contextual information for each country to help paint a fuller picture of the dynamics affecting both leaders’ decisions and the virus’ spread. FPA’s COVID-19 Global Response Index supplements The Global Race to Vaccinate report and FP’s international COVID-19 coverage, expert dialogues, and special events that are convening pre-eminent leaders in global health, policy, and security from around the world.

The Index was developed with insights from social scientists, public health experts, and leading epidemiologists working at the forefront of the pandemic response, including those from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the University of Oxford, the University of Michigan, the University of Maryland, the University of Massachusetts, UC-Irvine, and UC-Davis’ collaboration with USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats project, among others. We are grateful for their contributions.

The full index is available to subscribers.