Monday, 5 July 2021, 11:01 am
In October 2019, right before the world got hit by the
biggest global pandemic since 1918 (the Spanish
flu), a ranking
of 195 countries on their preparedness to deal with a
global pandemic was published, and the numbers 1 and 2 (top
scorers) on it were two countries that turned out actually
to be among the world’s worst on dealing with this new
coronavirus. #1 was U.S., and #2 was UK. #3 was Netherlands.
By contrast, New Zealand, which turned out to have had the
best performance among all of the wealthy or
high-per-capita-GDP countries, scored only #35 on it, while
two of the world’s very best-performing countries at