Malaysia has fallen significantly and is near the bottom of the heap in the "2021 Bloomberg Covid Resilience Ranking" for the month of June - ranking 51st position out of 53 economies measured in economy size of more than US$200 billion.
It is a sharp decline considering that Malaysia was ranked 16th on the same scale in January of this year, a time when the administration of Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin declared an emergency to combat the Covid-19 pandemic.
A key new element to the ranking - "Reopening Progress" - has played a major role in Malaysia's fall.
“Almost a year and a half into the pandemic, the best and worst places to be in the Covid-19 era are increasingly defined by one thing: normalisation.
“The biggest vaccination drive in history is enabling parts of the globe to abolish mask mandates, relax restrictions and dismantle border curbs, making the magnitude of reopening key to quality of life.
"Taming cases and deaths was once paramount, along with ensuring a robust healthcare system. Now, the ability to essentially turn back the clock and return to pre-pandemic times is taking on an even greater significance," said Bloomberg.
This explains why the United States, which suffered more than half a million deaths under the presidency of Donald Trump, is now ranked first.
“Central to (recovery) is an economy’s openness to the world, and that’s why we’ve introduced a new element - Reopening Progress - to Bloomberg’s Covid Resilience Ranking.
"Two new metrics capture the ease of moving in and out of a place and how much air travel has recovered, alongside our 10 other measures tracking mortality rates to infection counts, freedom of movement to economic growth.” it said.
The new factors include the percentage of population covered by vaccines, lockdown severity, flight capacity and vaccinated travel routes, all of which show Malaysia lagging.
Aside from the United States, others in the top 10 included New Zealand, Switzerland, Israel, France, Spain, Australia, mainland China, the UK and South Korea.
Four of those countries - namely the US, France, Spain and the UK - were among the worst hit by Covid-19 in the world.
Singapore is ranked 13th while Thailand and Vietnam are 39th and 40th respectively.
When the emergency was declared on Jan 11, 2021, Malaysia had a cumulative death toll of 555, but that number reached 5,001 as of yesterday.
Veteran DAP leader Lim Kit Siang has hit out at the falling Bloomberg ranking, saying:
"After five months of the emergency and 28 days of total lockdowns, we have fallen 35 rungs to the 51st rank in the June 2021 Bloomberg Covid Resilience Ranking.
"There cannot be a more damning judgement of the dismal failure of the Muhyiddin government in the war against the Covid-19 pandemic in the last six months.
"Now we are even worse than Brazil, Peru, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Colombia, Indonesia and India and only better than Philippines and Argentina," he said. - Mkini
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