Bangladesh now 14th in global Covid recovery
The country was 26th in last month’s recovery index
Beating other South Asian countries yet again, Bangladesh has moved twelve notches up, ranking 14th globally, in the latest Nikkei Covid-19 Recovery Index released on Friday.
Bangladesh was 26th in last month's recovery index.
At the end of each month, the index assesses Covid recovery of 121 countries based on infection management, vaccine rollouts, and social mobility, posting a score between 0 and 90.
Bangladesh scored 65.5, the highest among six South Asian countries assessed in the index.
India and Pakistan jointly secured second place in the region and 22nd globally, with a score of 62.5 since their Covid situation has been improving.
Meanwhile, with a score of 54, Nepal and Sri Lanka both came in third in the region, ranking 53rd globally. The region's worst performer, Afghanistan, slipped to 103.
In this indexing, "A higher ranking indicates that a country or region is closer to recovery with its low numbers of confirmed Covid-19 cases, better vaccination rates, and less stringent social distancing measures."
Bangladesh has been experiencing a daily positivity rate below 5% since 21 September and the rate has been below 2% since 16 October.
Even in the first half of August, the daily death tally was above 200 for 20 days in a row, but in stark contrast, the country reported only three deaths and 196 new cases this Friday.
However, Bangladesh also has the lowest vaccination rate in South Asia except for Afghanistan, with just 18.05% of its population fully inoculated till Thursday, according to Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) data.
With the highest score of 74, the United Arab Emirates topped the recovery index, followed by Malta, Chile, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.
Laos ranked last with a score of just 24, followed by Haiti, Latvia, Barbados, and Venezuela.
This index came after Bloomberg's Covid Resilience Ranking report released on 27 October, in which too, Bangladesh advanced four rungs to rank 35th among the world's 53 most populous countries, as the country's resilience to the deadly virus has strengthened further.
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India's COVID vaccination rate is 24.5% (fully vaccinated) while that of Bangladesh is only 18.3%, yet Bangladesh ranks much higher than India on COVID recovery index.
India even, with a much higher per capita healthcare spending, has a much shorter life expectancy than Bangladesh. The only explanation to the puzzle is India's inferior genetic make-up. This of course depends on their castes but upper caste Indians are a small minority so must be considered as outliers.