Lebanon currently has 1388 confirmed coronavirus (COVID-19) infections in total, 526 of which are active cases. The silver lining is, it is still among the safer countries in the world in regard to the pandemic. Here’s what the data shows.
Deep Knowledge Group, a consortium of commercial and non-profit organizations, recently conducted a study to assess the safest and least safe countries and regions in the world in terms of COVID-19.
The 250-page report uses a point-based system to rank the countries. These data points are determined for each subject based on its performance considering 130 different parameters and in terms of six categories.
Overall, Lebanon ranked the 77th safest country in the world, settling in between Belgium (78th) and Mongolia (76th), and the 10th in the MENA region.
The categories explored by the study are quarantine efficiency, government efficiency of risk management, monitoring and detection, healthcare readiness, regional resiliency, and emergency preparedness.
Respectively for each category, Lebanon scored 92, 106, 94, 69, 82, and 56. Hence, its cumulative score is 499 points. In comparison, the score of Switzerland, the safest of all the countries in this study, is 752.
In the final results, the countries targeted by the study were divided among 4 groups (tier 1-4), and Lebanon found its place in the penultimate group, Tier 3 (440-633 points).
Interestingly, the report states that “Tier 3 consists of territories that should have ranked higher in terms of regional COVID-19 safety and stability, but which for one or another reason did not.”
“The regions included in Tier 3 are, therefore, outliers, and to some extent anomalies,” it adds.
In other words, the study found that Lebanon was among the countries that had a level of pre-pandemic readiness that should have allowed it to perform better in the aforementioned categories.
And the fact that it didn’t score higher shows that a better performance is not determined by the quality of healthcare in the country before the pandemic hits but by the strategies used by the government to actively combat it when it does.
*All images used in this article belong to Deep Knowledge Group’s COVID-19 Regional Safety Assessment report.
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