NPR.

The pandemic has affected every country in the world, but which of these countries has

been the most resilient in the face of this crisis?

And if you were to rank all the countries, which ones would come out on top?

I can late 2020, a group of journalists at Bloomberg News decided to try and answer

this question.

They looked at 53 countries with the world's biggest economies.

They then crunched the data on everything from COVID deaths to the quality of life, to

economic recovery.

And they came up with a running list and they called it its COVID resilience ranking.

At the beginning it was very much a bit of a shot in the dark.

Rachel Chang oversees virus coverage for Bloomberg's Asia desk.

She says that in the beginning this project had its skeptics, including her own husband.

He actually was like, it's really mean to rank countries.

You know, like that was kind of really his perspective as a people dying.

And he's like, yes, people are dying, but that's precisely why we're trying to do this

because we do think that these things that can be learned from which places are performing

the best because those lessons can save lives.

So what Rachel and her team learned from doing this ranking for over a year and a half

was that certain countries almost seem to have a magic formula when it came to dealing

with the pandemic.

They called them the pandemic MVPs.

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