Virus World

How Covid-19 has affected health and economics around the world? Nearly every nation on earth is struggling to reopen its economy safely while continuing to battle the coronavirus. But some are doing better than others. We’ve mapped the performance of 30 leading countries by plotting their health and economic outcomes and grouping them based on whether they have instituted light, moderate or severe restrictions on commerce and social interactions. The coronavirus pandemic has spread across countries at different times, and each has responded differently depending on their health and political systems, as well as their economies. Despite some bright spots, nearly every country presents a mixed picture.

 

This matrix considers countries' bottom lines when it comes to infections, deaths, GDP and unemployment, as well as how those metrics were shaped by specific government interventions. Germany, for example, has diverse but relatively bad outcomes overall. Its economy is sinking at the same rate as its neighbors, but its death rate is significantly lower than theirs, thanks to widely lauded testing and health care.That said, Berlin’s official count of Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes is both slow and patchy. Some countries test widely (Iceland) and count all possible Covid-19 deaths (Belgium), skewing their numbers compared to less transparent countries (Russia). New Zealand and Sweden took opposite approaches to restricting their populations’ movement and have very different health outcomes, but nearly identical recessions. Several countries have similar GDP numbers but starkly different unemployment rates (the U.S., the U.K. and Japan), a function of whether the government guarantees workers’ salaries. 

 

India avoided overwhelming its fragile health system via the world’s biggest lockdown, but that, in turn, tanked its economy, which might contract 45 percent this quarter. Taiwan, meanwhile, did nearly everything right in terms of its response to the health crisis, but can’t escape the fact that 70 percent of its GDP comes from hard-hit export sectors.....