Next Our own sovereign rating actions since March 2020 have taken into consideration the nature of the shock triggered by this public-health crisis – massive, but exogenous and temporary – and how well countries have been able to respond to it. For now, monetary and external flexibility as well as economic resilience are better indicators of sovereign creditworthiness than a country’s debt-to-GDP ratio. Globally, we have downgraded nearly a quarter of the sovereigns we currently rate. Most are lower-rated emerging- or frontier-market borrowers that had pre-existing vulnerabilities and less financial resilience and flexibility to deal with COVID-19 and its economic consequences. This includes seven defaults, all by sovereigns that were at the lower end of our rating scale (“B” or below) before the pandemic.