CGTN：Bloomberg's COVID-19 ranking epitomizes 'business first, humans last'
BEIJING, July 16, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- 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."
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