(Daily News Scan - DNS English) What is Stringency Index?
The Coronavirus spread has made each nation to keep its people under lockdown. With no vehicles, people and most of the business inoperative it is becoming very difficult for everyone to be under the lockdown for months. Many of the countries took immediate actions in responding to Coronavirus outbreak. India also took this issue seriously and enforced one of the strongest lockdown at the initial stages. University of Oxford has created The Stringency Index, stating India had one of the strongest lockdown measures in the world — at a 100 score since March 22.
In this DNS we will know about Stringency Index
The University of Oxford has created an Index, which is one of the metrics being used by the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker. This tracker comprises a team of 100 Oxford community members who have continuously updated a database of 17 indicators of government response. The indicators examine containment policies such as school and workplace closings, public events, public transport, and stay-at-home policies. The Stringency Index is a number from 0 to 100 that reflects these indicators. A higher index score indicates a higher level of stringency.
The index provides a picture of the stage at which any country enforced its strongest measures. This means how strict a country’s measures were, and at what stage of the spread it enforced these.
Some countries witnessed their deaths begin to flatten as they reached their highest stringency, such as Italy, Spain, or France. As China pulled stronger measures, its death curve plateaued.
If we talk about countries like India, US and UK, the oxfords graph find that the death curve has not flattened after strictest measures were enforced. On comparing India with other countries, India called its strict lockdown at a much earlier point on its case and death curves. The other countries- France, Italy, Iran, Germany, UK, Netherlands, Sweden, Mexico, Canada, Belgium, Ireland, US, Turkey, Israel, China, and Switzerland had more than 500 cases when they called their strictest lockdown, while India had 320. When India had only 4 deaths on March 22, when its score reached 100, other countries had more deaths at that point except Switzerland.
Some other countries along with India to have a score of hundred in this list are Honduras, Argentina, Jordan, Libya, Sri Lanka, Serbia, and Rwanda. Among these now India has the highest number of cases.
In one of the research notes the researchers examined if countries meet four of the six World Health Organization’s (WHO) recommendations for relaxing physical distancing measures.
These are:
- control transmission to a level the healthcare system can manage
- the healthcare system can detect and isolate all cases
- manage transfer to and from high-risk transmission zones
- community engagement
In this India scored 0.7 (below Australia, Thailand, Taiwan, and South Korea) because it scored 0 for controlling its cases. The highest scorers on this index, at 0.9, were Iceland, Hong Kong, Croatia, and Trinidad & Tobago. Oxford could not find any of the countries meet the four measured recommendations. But around 20 of them are close in reaching it.
