Tag: Analytical Insights

In June 2020, PEMANDU Associates in collaboration with MOSTI launched the Global COVID-19 Index (GCI), a daily updated index tracking 180 different economies / countries on the severity and the recovery status from COVID-19.

In October 2020, a revamped methodology with feedback from the World Health Organisation (WHO) was introduced. This methodology now tracks the past 90 days instead of the start of the pandemic to give a better reflection of the status of the recovery and severity. We concurrently run this methodology side-by-side with our original methodology.

In November 2020, the GCI wins the highest accolade via the Chairman’s Award at the 2020 WITSA Global ICT Excellence Awards. The Award is an annual event held by the World Information Technology and Services Alliance (WITSA), the latter representing IT associations from 84 economies around the world.

In May 2021, we have yet again made an improvement to our revamped methodology. With the world now closely monitoring vaccine rollouts, we are rebalancing the GCI Recovery Index to reflect these developments. In simple terms, countries with the most advanced vaccine rollouts, low active case numbers, and an active test, track and trace policy will rank relatively higher than their peers.

Our split of dynamic indicators and semi-dynamic indicators remains at a ratio at a 70:30 perspective.

We have also now included a vaccine dashboard to our main page, and have each individual country’s page reflect their respective vaccine rollout as part of the visual map.

We will continue to monitor and improve the GCI as the world continues its fight to overcome the pandemic.

We are pleased to update that we have applied new Recovery Case Data derivative calculations for Spain and have also updated the formula for Serbia. This enables a more consistent alignment of calculation methods applied for countries which similarly do not report Recoveries such as the United Kingdom, Sweden and Netherlands.

For Spain, we have recognised that there has been no information released on recoveries for over 90 days as at end August 2020. As such, for the purpose of the GCI recovery index calculations, we have applied the same derivative formula as that of United Kingdom and Sweden and taken the sum of 3 weeks of new cases. For the moment we have omitted hospitalisation data as this too is unavailable. The new calculations will be effective 3 June 2020.

For Serbia, we recognise that the Republic of Serbia’s Ministry of Health in collaboration with the Dr. Milan Jovanovic Batut Institute of Health publish a daily dashboard which includes information on hospitalised patients and also those on ventilators. As mentioned in our previous methodology update, we make reference to the World Health Organisation Report (Report of the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)) dated February 2020, which indicates that “…the median time from onset to clinical recovery for mild cases is approximately 2 weeks and is 3-6 weeks for patients with severe or critical disease.” For the purpose of the GCI recovery index calculations, we have now updated to the derivative formula to replace ventilator-cases with hospitalisation data. This is aligned to the same methodology we currently apply to the United Kingdom and Sweden. As such, the calculation is now the sum of 3 weeks of new cases and the latest reported total of patients in hospital. This new calculation method will be active as of 30 August 2020.

We will continue to monitor the respective countries’ progress and provide further updates should there be new changes to the derivative formulas. These changes ultimately are aimed at ensuring their respective Governments’ efforts are better represented as part of our GCI efforts.

Sources:
• Serbia Data: https://covid19.rs/homepage-english/
• WHO Report: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-china-joint-mission-on-covid-19-final-report.pdf