Zubair Qureshi
Prime Minister Imran Khan on Wednesday congratulated the National Command and Operation Centre, the nerve centre of Pakistan’s coronavirus response — the team of the Ehsaas Programme and the State Bank of Pakistan after The Economist ranked Pakistan among the best performing countries for handling the coronavirus pandemic.
The international journal Economist’s normalcy index tracks the progress of 50 countries’ return to pre-pandemic life on the basis of eight indicators classified into three categories.
Each country is scored out of 100 — the benchmark score for the pre-pandemic level of activity — on the index, where Pakistan’s current score is 84.4. This tracker is updated every week.
At present, the top-ranked country on the index is Hong Kong, with a score of 96.3, followed by New Zealand that has a score of 87.8. Pakistan is ranked third.
Sharing a screenshot of the index on Wednesday, Prime Minister Imran Khan in a social media post said, “Congratulations to NCOC members, Ehsaas team & State Bank of Pakistan for effective response to Covid-19 pandemic; and above all thanks to the mercy of Almighty Allah.”
Among other countries, China is ranked 19th with a score of 72.9 and India — which has been struggling in face of the pandemic after a disastrous outbreak of the highly contagious Delta variant — is ranked 48 with a score of 46.5.
South Korea and Colombia are at the bottom, each having an overall score of zero.
