Which country has had the best response to the coronavirus?

I pick the United Kingdom, even though their public health response has been generally poor.  Why? Their researchers have discovered the single-best mortality-reducing treatment, namely dexamethasone (the cheap steroid), and the Oxford vaccine is arguably the furthest along.  In a world where ideas are global public goods, research matters more than the quality of your testing regime!

And the very recent results on interferon beta — still unconfirmed I should add — come from…the UK.

At the very least, the UK is a clear first in per capita terms.  Here are the closing two paragraphs:

It is fine and even correct to lecture the British (and the Americans) for their poorly conceived messaging and public health measures. But it is interesting how few people lecture the Australians or the South Koreans for not having a better biomedical research establishment. It is yet another sign of how societies tend to undervalue innovation — which makes the U.K.’s contribution all the more important.

Critics of Brexit like to say that it will leave the U.K. as a small country of minor import. Maybe so. In the meantime, the Brits are on track to save the world.

Here is my full Bloomberg column on that topic.  And if you wish to go a wee bit Straussian on this one, isn’t it better if the poor performers on public health measures — if there are going to be some — are (sometimes) the countries with the best and most dynamic biomedical establishments?  Otherwise all the panic and resultant scurry amounts to nothing.  When Mexico has a poor public health response to Covid-19, the world doesn’t get that much back in return.  In this regard, I suspect that biomedical innovation in the United States is more sensitive to internal poor performance on Covid-19 than is the case for Oxford.