Long-time followers will know of my annoying habit of actually looking at the tables of subcomponents in the @TheEIU's (still very useful) world rankings --- and I regret to inform you that I have just read their table comparing global responses to Covid-19... and wowzers.

As an example of my previous work -- I once investigated why France was always a 'flawed democracy' on The EIU's maps. And I found that in the poorly justified category of 'political culture' it scores lower than China and equal to Vietnam and Zimbabwe. https://www.tomforth.co.uk/frenchdemocracy/

To be blunt --- the EIU's Covid-19 "quality of response" table is completely worthless and you should ignore it.

But full marks for being so transparent so that it's easy to judge that.

Seriously. And this will make you laugh. The UK has had the world's joint best response. It scores top marks. We couldn't have done any better.

Just to be clear, since I have been misunderstood. I am being sarcastic. Of course the UK has not had the world's best response to Covid-19. The table is complete rubbish. And yet, I genuinely suspect that similar tables are bouncing around Whitehall now. And are believed.

<sarcasm>
You may have watched the news in the UK and marvelled at Germany's ability to test people for Covid-19. But actually, The Economist Intelligence Unit say so, the UK actually did better than Germany at testing.
</sarcasm>

<sarcasm>
You may have watched the news in the UK and thought it was bad how people were being moved out of hospitals and having care cancelled. But actually, the UK actually did better than Denmark and New Zealand at continuing to provide non Covid-19 healthcare.
</sarcasm>

The methodology is here. It's a reasonable first effort. Then you get the results and you think again. I couldn't have pressed publish. I would have been too embarrassed. But they did.

<sarcasm>
The only thing that the UK didn't do perfectly in response to Covid-19 was stopping the highest proportion of its population from dying.
</sarcasm>

Here's the table. The introduce a death rate column so that the UK scores low. But this isn't a "quality of response" score. That's an outcome score. The two columns it has for quality of response are to the left, and the UK scores 4 out of 4 on both. And it's so clearly absurd.

I am already dreading the number of times this table will be brought up in bad faith by people working in and with UK government.