Canada remains stuck near the bottom of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s COVID Misery Index, ending up at 11th place in this week’s overall combined rankings.
The Index compares 15 peer nations by capturing the impacts on human health in terms of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths (Disease Misery), the government response measures (Response Misery), and the cost in terms of jobs, growth and public finances (Economic Misery). Updated on a weekly basis by Richard Audas, a health statistician at Memorial University of Newfoundlandand and designer of the index, it tracks the overall scores throughout the pandemic and analyzes changes over recent weeks.
The reason for our sub-par ranking? “Excess deaths (death rates above the norm) from non-COVID causes are a major explanation of Canada’s poor pandemic performance compared to other advanced countries,” he writes. “New variants of COVID-19 could dampen the optimism coming from the roll-out of vaccines.”
The end of the pandemic seems tantalizingly in reach for Canadians, especially with the increasing reports of our southern neighbours getting nearer to normal as America’s vaccine roll-out surges.
But, Audas concludes, “the potential for a slow-down in vaccinations, coupled with rising case numbers, the transmission speed of the disease variants, and populations exhausted by more than a year of economic and social upheaval, may result in a more miserable summer than we hope for.”
