Curfews and other restrictions on daily life aimed at curbing the virus' spread remain a reality for millions around the world.
Governments have been cautious about easing lockdown measures after the lifting of restrictions over the summer led to new waves of the virus. For many, optimism generated by rapid progress in the development has been partially offset by concerns over slow rollouts and their efficacy with new, highly transmissible variants of the virus.
This page provides an ongoing visual representation of the worldwide imposition
and relaxation of lockdown measures. It uses the Covid-19 government response stringency index, a composite score developed by researchers at Oxford university, to compare
countries’ policy responses to the coronavirus pandemic.
Latest changes
- •October 27, 2021: Graphics now use the stringency index with version 3.7 of the index methodology.
- •June 1, 2020: Graphics now use the stringency index with version 3.1 of the index methodology.
- •May 5, 2020: Graphics updated to use a six-colour instead of five-colour scale to represent stringency index values.
- •May 1, 2020: Map animation controls added. Graphics now use the stringency index with version 2.0 of the index methodology.
Apr 27 2022
Lockdowns around the world
Oxford Covid-19 government response stringency index
Help the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford university improve the
stringency index used in this map by providing
direct feedback.
Stringency index: how it works
Every country’s lockdown is different. The wide range of measures adopted by
different governments poses a challenge to analysts who want to compare these
policies over time or between countries.
To enable such comparisons, a team at Oxford university’s Blavatnik School of
Government is maintaining a database of pandemic-response policies and using
it to derive an index of the measures’ overall stringency.
More than 100 volunteer academics and students collate publicly-available
information on government response measures, across nine policy areas. These
are assigned stringency ratings which are then used to derive a composite score between 0 and 100. Most other efforts to track the pandemic response take the
form of lists of events without attempting to create comparable measures
across countries.
The Oxford team is not currently collecting any sub-national data, meaning
that the index does not perfectly capture local measures in large or federal
countries. A measure only in force in one or two regions contributes less to
the stringency index than a nationwide policy, but rules in force in only one
or two regions can also inflate a whole country’s overall score.
Reporting, data analysis, design and development by Steven Bernard, David Blood, Cale Tilford, Max Harlow, Caroline Nevitt, Ændrew Rininsland, Alan Smith, Martin Stabe, Aleksandra Wisniewska.
An earlier version of the timeline heatmap graphic on this page represented
dates where stringency index values were missing and those where the values
were zero as equivalent. This has since been amended.
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Besides, Israel is part of the ME only geographically but not culturally nor militarily and she may be jolly proud of that.
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=swe&areas=gbr&cumulative=0&logScale=0&perMillion=1&values=deaths
This allows two countries to be compared for new cases, deaths etc on a per million of population basis. I compared Sweden, with a lax lockdown regime, to the UK.
Generally, on this basis, the Swedish figures are a bit lower than those for the UK, but the shapes of the curves are very similar. There seems to be no evidence that the degree of lockdown affects the trajectory of the infection.
Also, although the number of new deaths is declining in both countries, the number of new cases has plateaued (70 pm for the UK and 60 pm for Sweden).
These figures lead me to suppose that the virus may be a lot more infectious but less virulent that is generally assumed. It may be working its way through the population at large, but causing only mild or non-existent symptoms in many cases. This would explain the ineffectiveness of lockdown and the constant new infection rate.
The peaking and subsequent decline in the death rate might be due to the fact that the virus quickly infected many of the vulnerable.
Also, I suggest you compare Spain which at one point had the fastest growth anywhere, with the UK. The Spanish curve also feel much quicker than the UK, as the lock down was significantly stricter. As you say, though, the deaths per million are broadly similar (especially as it is widely thought that the UK is under-reporting, as evidenced by excess deaths) so even if Spain provides some evidence that harsher lockdowns flatten the curve more quickly, overall it may make no difference, assuming ICU does not get overwhelmed.
The Oxford index itself is, I feel, misnamed and slightly "off". There are two halves: stringency in the sense of degree of restriction on normal life, and investment or provision (new money for vaccines, level of tracing available etc). Lumping them together into a single metric causes two trends to be buried by commingling the scoring of their features: if you contact trace like mad you may be very lax about constraints on normal life.
The stringency half of the picture just doesn't capture the actual level of stringency. Children not being able to leave the house for six weeks in Spain versus daily walks and families playing in parks in Britain? Road blocks and police patrols with thousands of fines in the hundreds of Euros for cycling at all, or more than 2km from your home? No exercise in Paris for half the day? The chart shows the UK as more stringent for longer than Spain, which is pretty odd.
All of those aspects of the largest on-the-ground differences are concentrated into a couple of points in the score, so the spectrum is very compressed at the "high end" of stringency.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2020/may/01/sweden-coronavirus-strategy-nationalists-britain
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8273237/Swedens-virologist-admits-little-protect-elderly.html