Pandemic Misery Index
This post first appeared on LSE Europe blog What has been the economic and health performance of different countries since the covid19 crisis began? I propose to rank countries on the basis of how they have fared since the ongoing pandemic began by combining data on two dimensions: a health dimension capturing mortality data; and an economic dimension capturing increases in unemployment. While the two indicators I select cannot provide an exhaustive picture, they are nevertheless useful in giving us some sense of how countries have fared across two of the dimensions that the covid19 crisis has affected most. A measure of health costs The health dimension is based on the so-called p-score. This data is available from the ourworldindata website (data extracted on 14 th November 2020) and captures the weekly deviation of current mortality from the 5 years average for that week. Excess mortality have two advantages over more direct measures of covid19 deaths. Fi
