India was amongst the first few countries to impose a lockdown

India was one of the first few countries to put the whole country in complete lockdown except allowing essential services. A recently created Index by the University of Oxford suggests that India enforced one of the strongest lockdowns around the world. The Stringency Index gave India a score of 100 out of 100 for strict lockdown measures which was relaxed a little from 20^th April.

Let’s understand the Stringency Index first

Stringency Index is one of the metrics that is used by Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker. A team of 100 people from the Oxford community members have continuously updated the database of 17 indicators of government response as lockdown to the global pandemic. These indicators examine containment policies such as the closure of workplaces and schools, stay-at-home policies, public transport, public events. It gives countries numbers from 0 to 100 where 100 indicates the higher level of stringency.

It gives a picture of how strong the countries across the world have enforced the lockdown restrictions. The report also provides an overlay of countries’ death curve. It found that some countries like China, Italy, Spain, or France observed their death curve to begin to flatten when they reached the highest stringency.

IN countries like the USA, the UK and India, the oxford graphs finds that the curve hasn’t flattened even after stricter measures. From the most number of death count as their strongest measures, the countries compared were the UK, Netherlands, Italy, France, Germany, Iran, Mexico, Sweden, Canada, US, Belgium, India, China, Israel, Switzerland, Turkey and Ireland.

How India fares when compared to other countries?

When compared to other countries with higher or smaller case load, India called its stricter lockdown way early on its death curves and cases. India had 320 cases when it enforced the lockdown while the other 18 countries had more than 500 cases. Only four people had died on March 22, when India’s score reached 100, while most countries had more deaths at that time.

Spain took stricter measures late than every other country in its case and death count. Sweden had the most liberal restrictions in this set and Iran had the second-best liberal restrictions.

Other countries who scored 100 apart from India are Sri Lanka, Honduras, Jordan, Argentina, Serbia, Libya and Rwanda. Currently, India has the highest number of cases among these countries.

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