The terrifyingly global progression of COVID-19 over the past year should shake long-held assumptions about the benefits of wealth and industrial-technological development. Estimations of which countries were best prepared for a pandemic display those prejudices in full: The 2019 Global Health Security Index, jointly produced by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the Nuclear Threat Initiative, ranked the United States at the top, with the United Kingdom immediately behind it, then the Netherlands, and Sweden only a few rows down; New Zealand comes in at number 35; and Africa is blocked in red. A Washington Post report on the index when it was released expresses patronizing surprise that a “number of middle- and low-income countries scored higher than some wealthy countries.”
Contrasting those assessments with reality shows just how inaccurate they were. A map of COVID-19 deaths per hundred thousand people shows almost the opposite of the preparedness map: The United States, the U.K., and most of Europe are dark with total deaths, while most of Africa and Asia has had far fewer.
