CORONAVIRUS GOVERNMENT RESPONSE TRACKER

Oxford University’s coronavirus government response tracker extends to cover economic and testing measures

A pioneering tool to track and compare policy responses of governments tackling coronavirus around the world now includes information about testing, contact tracing and income support.

The University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government has expanded its pioneering research on tracking governments’ policy responses to the coronavirus outbreak to include measures such as income support to citizens, testing regime or emergency investments into healthcare.

The Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker – launched last March and now counting data from more than 160 countries (including China, South Korea, Italy, UK and USA) – systematically records government responses to the coronavirus worldwide on 17 indicators such as school closures and travel restrictions.

The new indices, reporting a number between 1 and 100 to reflect the level of government action on the topics in question, are:

1. an overall government response index (which records how the response of governments
   has varied over all indicators in the database, becoming stronger or weaker over the course
   of the outbreak);
2. a containment and health index (which combines ‘lockdown’ restrictions and closures with
   measures such as testing policy and contact tracing, short term investment in healthcare, as
   well investments in vaccine)
3. an economic support index (which records measures such as income support and debt
   relief)
4. as well as the original stringency index (which records the strictness of ‘lockdown style’
   policies that primarily restrict people’s behaviour).

The Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker’s data and its indices are freely available online and will continue to be updated, refined and improved throughout the crisis: www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/covidtracker

Thomas Hale, Associate Professor of Global Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and lead for this project, said:

“It’s been encouraging to see that the Blavatnik School’s government response tracker has been a useful tool for policymakers, public health professionals, academics and concerned citizens to understand disease progression and policy response. We’ve improved and expanded the government response tracker to help governments continue to adopt an evidencebased approach and establish which measures are effective and which are not.”

Importantly, the data also informs the new version of the ‘lockdown rollback checklist’: a checklist that looks at countries’ readiness to exit lockdown based on how closely they meet four of the six World Health Organization’s recommendation for relaxing physical distancing rules. The updated checklist now takes into account the number of tests each country is doing, as well better ways to assess the risk of community transmission. According to this analysis at the time of writing countries like New Zealand and Taiwan are best placed to rollback their restrictions.

The Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker data is collected from publicly available information by a cross-disciplinary Oxford University team of over one hundred academics, students and alumni from every part of the world.

Souce : University of Oxford

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