Filenews 22 March 2021 - by Theano Thiopoulou
With a score of 75, Cyprus is in 26th place among 184 countries around the world on the severity of the measures it is taking to tackle the pandemic.
Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) of the University of Oxford is a tool for recording the measures each country is taking for COVID 19. It takes into account a total of 19 different government response indicators and calibrates the rigour of decisions on a scale of 1 to 100. The administrators of the application specify that the recording and evaluation relate only to the rigour of government policies and should not be interpreted as "scoring" the appropriateness or effectiveness of each country's response.
"A higher position in an index does not mean that a country's response is better than others lower in the ranking," he points out. Of the 19 indicators of government decisions - available to the public - collected by OxCGRT, 8 relate to policies to restrict traffic and close schools and other activities. Four indicators record economic policies, such as income support for citizens and debt relief. Seven indicators relate to policies in the health system, such as Covid-19 tests, contact tracing, urgent investment in healthcare and, more recently, vaccination programmes.
The three categories make up the general response indicator of each country. In other major countries of the world, for example, the rating of the severity of the measures is 64.35 in the USA, 75.46 in Canada, 50.46 in Australia, 48.15 in Japan, 64.35 in Brazil, 40.28 in Russia. Turkey has 64.81, while China, where the pandemic began, has just 35.17.
It is worth noting that France and Poland are reinstating the restrictive measures to stop the spread of the new coronavirus following the further increase in cases. Poland has been putting in place a partial quarantine for three weeks since 20 March, as fatigue from measures to tackle the pandemic increases in countries such as Canada, Austria and Bulgaria, where protests against the restrictions have taken place.
In France, the government announced its third lockdown in a year for 21 million French people, including the residents of Paris. However, it is more flexible and less restrictive than that imposed in March 2020.
Country Tightening Index
Greece: 88.89
Ireland: 84.26
Italy: 84.26
United Kingdom: 82.40
France: 79.63
Germany: 77.78
Portugal: 76.85
Cyprus: 75
Netherlands: 75
Romania: 73.15
Poland: 71.30
Slovakia: 71.30
Spain: 71.30
Czech Republic: 69.44
Slovenia: 69.44
Sweden: 69.44
Lithuania: 66.67
Luxembourg: 61.11
Belgium: 60.19
Denmark: 60.19
Latvia: 56.48
Bulgaria: 53.70
Malta: 52.78
Finland: 52.31
Croatia: 43.52
Estonia: 41.67
Source: OxCGRT
