MEASUREMENTS GONE AWRY: MORE PANDEMIC PREPAREDNESS, WORSE PANDEMIC OUTCOMES

Key Points:

  • In 2019, the Gates Foundation created a metric to measure a country’s level of pandemic preparedness, called the Global Health Security Index. In 2020, an actual pandemic, COVID-19, started.
  • However, the observed correlations with the COVID-19 death rate suggests the preparedness measures did not capture what they claimed to: a higher preparedness score is associated with more deaths per person from an actual pandemic.
  • The U.S. had the highest GHS Index, meaning they were allegedly most prepared, followed by the U.K. But both have relatively high deaths per capita.
  • The data suggest that conventional measures of pandemic preparedness may not predict outcomes during a pandemic as well as some seem to believe.
Source GHS Index Worldometer