MALACAÑANG reacted on Wednesday to Bloomberg’s latest Covid Resilience Ranking, saying it showed “little consideration” for local data when Bloomberg again placed the Philippines at the bottom of the list. Acting Presidential Spokesman Karlo B. Nograles took exception to the fact that the ranking gave much emphasis to general criteria such as severity, flight capacity, and vaccinated travel routes.
“There is little consideration for country-specific Covid-19 context, which in our view is imperative to objectively assess how countries manage pandemic response,” Nograles said, adding that Bloomberg did not give much weight on how the active local Covid-19 cases continue to fall, reaching only 425 active cases as of November 30, 2021—the lowest reported in 2021 after the government implemented its new Alert Level System. (Read, Bloomberg Resilience Index: Palace laments bias against local data, in the BusinessMirror, December 1, 2021).
National Task Force Against Covid-19 chief implementer and vaccine czar Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr. also questioned the ranking, saying Bloomberg might be doing something wrong in measuring the Philippines’ resilience to the disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. “Our numbers are very encouraging. We have 7.1 GDP [growth] last quarter. We have a [Covid] positivity rate of 2.3 percent. We have below 500 cases. I think Bloomberg should reconsider their parameters. I think there is an error, maybe,” he said.
From Bloomberg: “The Covid Resilience Ranking is a monthly snapshot of where the virus is being handled the most effectively with the least social and economic upheaval. Compiled using 12 data indicators that span virus containment, quality of health care, vaccination coverage, overall mortality and progress toward restarting travel, the Ranking captures how the world’s biggest 53 economies are responding to the same once-in-a-generation threat.”
This is not the first time that Bloomberg’s ranking was criticized. When it ranked the United States Number 1 a few months back, Eric Ding, senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, told CGTN anchor Wang Guan that the ranking is “not the fairest” in that it equally weighed 12 indicators and failed to capture the success a country had in containing the virus or in giving its citizens meaningful freedom. This is exactly what Galvez and Nograles are trying to say.
In an article published in Global Times—Bloomberg’s Covid Resilience Ranking is ridiculous information warfare—Andrew Korybko said: “The popular [and supposedly credible] New York City-headquartered outlet Bloomberg recently placed the US at the top of its ‘Covid Resilience Ranking’ while putting China in eighth place. This is nothing more than ridiculous information warfare, which discredits this media platform. It inaccurately exaggerates the US’s successes at containing the pandemic while ignoring its many shortcomings that continue to plague the country’s epidemiological security to this day. From the flip side, it ignores China’s successes while dishonestly attempting to discredit its effective policies. China was the first country in the world to contain Covid-19.”
In an article published in CGTN—Analysis: Why Bloomberg’s Covid resilience ranking is flawed—authorLi Ruikang said: “The latest version of a Covid Resilience Ranking published by Bloomberg has drawn the ire of people across the world. The problematic attribute undermining the ranking is a relative lack of interest in both the human toll and governments’ attempts to avoid it… It ranks the US, which has recorded the most Covid-19 deaths in the world, as number one. Meanwhile, Australia, the Chinese mainland and Japan, often praised for their decisive Covid-19 measures, are ranked seventh, eighth and 23rd, respectively. Negative sentiments around the findings are high. According to a Twitter analysis, the number of people expressing a negative view of Bloomberg’s report is three times as many as those that agree with it. Netizens are calling it a “laughing stock,” as the Covid-19 calamities in some of the places at the top of the list are still a fresh memory. “Joke,” “fake” and “shameless” are the most frequent words used by social-media users to describe the ranking. What also seems to echo through them is the report’s tendency to disregard human lives.”
Need we say more?