The UK and the US need to learn from countries that better handled Covid-19 | Laura Spinney

Vietnam's 2003 Sars epidemic and Senegal's 2014 Ebola outbreak informed their fast and effective responses

In October 2019, in those halcyon pre-Covid-19 days, a chart was published that ranked 195 countries according to their capacity to deal with outbreaks of infectious disease. Drawn up by the Washington DC-based Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, Maryland, the 2019 Global Health Security Index (GHSI) placed the US and UK first and second, respectively. South Korea came ninth, New Zealand 35th and China 51st, while a number of African countries brought up the rear.

Well, that was droll. Either the authors of the chart got their colour key inside out or our definition of health security needs an overhaul - and given all the fancy data visualisation software available these days it's unlikely to be the former. Of course, the pandemic is not over. But back in March, when the index was already looking about as accurate as a 2016 US election poll, Johns Hopkins health policy analyst Sarah Dalglish wrote in the Lancet: The pandemic has given the lie to the notion that expertise is concentrated in, or at least best channelled by, legacy powers and historically rich states." And she hasn't changed her view.