Recently, U.S. news agency Bloomberg published its Covid Resilience Ranking for 
June. The United States was ranked first.

Bloomberg explains that the U.S. "reflects a best-case scenario of high 
vaccinations, a waning outbreak, flight capacity nearing full recovery, and few 
travel curbs on vaccinated people." Normalization, the ability to "turn back 
the clock and return to pre-pandemic times," is claimed to be the most 
important thing.

CGTN First Voice studied the metric used by Bloomberg to rank the countries and 
finds it has a very strong pro-business bias. Of the 12 components, only four 
measure "Quality of Life," and two of those could be counted as measuring 
economic activity. In this way, the U.S. having had the highest number of 
COVID-19 deaths in the world and the more than 600,000 American lives lost 
barely register in the ranking.

And the ranking metric treats lockdown as a vice. The two additional metrics in 
this round that led to U.S. jumping to the first place are "the ease and moving 
in and out of a place" and "how much air travel has recovered." There are total 
of four components measuring the speed of lifting COVID-19 restrictions, 
treating this as if lifting them is "always and incontestably a good idea." 
Places that are still conducting lockdowns to fight the pandemic are penalized.

"Keep the economy humming; nothing else matters," CGTN First Voice wrote. 
"Bloomberg's COVID Resilience Ranking supports the policies of the previous 
administration."

In the United States, corporate interests have always had a high priority in 
politics and policy-making. Bloomberg's metrics reflect the same priority that 
the U.S. government has followed since the beginning of the outbreak.

The U.S. has been seeing a resurgence of COVID-19 cases due to the rapidly 
spreading Delta variant. The case numbers still rise at a speed of more than 
30,000 cases each day. Hundreds of people are still dying due to the virus in 
the U.S. ABC reports that 30 percent of adults in the U.S. have not received a 
vaccine against COVID-19 and have no plan to do so.

"It is advocating the removal of epidemic-related barriers to doing business," 
CGTN First Voice concluded, "and this ranking destroys Bloomberg's credibility."

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-07-15/Bloomberg-s-COVID-19-ranking-epitomizes-business-first-humans-last--11Ut7LjJxYc/index.html


SOURCE: CGTN


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   Caption: Bloomberg's COVID-19 ranking epitomizes 'business first, humans 
last'