The Global Health Security Index is not predictive of coronavirus pandemic responses among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries

Abstract

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has devastated many countries with ripple effects felt in various sectors of the global economy. In November 2019, the Global Health Security (GHS) Index was released as the first detailed assessment and benchmarking of 195 countries to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease threats. This paper presents the first comparison of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development OECD countries' performance during the pandemic, with the pre-COVID-19 pandemic preparedness as determined by the GHS Index. Using a rank-based analysis, four indices were compared between select countries, including total cases, total deaths, recovery rate, and total tests performed, all standardized for comparison. Our findings suggest a discrepancy between the GHS index rating and the actual performance of countries during this pandemic, with an overestimation of the preparedness of some countries scoring highly on the GHS index and underestimation of the preparedness of other countries with relatively lower scores on the GHS index.

Fig 1. Comparison of the GHS index ranks with the cumulative rank scores.

GHS = Global Health Security. The above graph represents the OECD countries ranked by the GHS index (shown in blue) in ascending fashion from left to right with a superimposed bar chart (shown in orange), which depicts the cumulative score ranking.