Monday, 5 July 2021, 11:01 am In October 2019, right before the world got hit by the biggest global pandemic since 1918 (the Spanish flu), a ranking of 195 countries on their preparedness to deal with a global pandemic was published, and the numbers 1 and 2 (top scorers) on it were two countries that turned out actually to be among the world’s worst on dealing with this new coronavirus. #1 was U.S., and #2 was UK. #3 was Netherlands. By contrast, New Zealand, which turned out to have had the best performance among all of the wealthy or high-per-capita-GDP countries, scored only #35 on it, while two of the world’s very best-performing countries at