International comparisons of the COVID-19 pandemic management: What can be learned from activity analysis techniques?

The worldwide spread of COVID-19 since the beginning of 2020 has had a huge humanitarian cost. The pandemic has affected most countries globally, to different extents, and governments have implemented a variety of policies to minimise the impact on public health. However, the policies have varied across territories, even within the same state. This article proposes a nonparametric activity analysis methodology to evaluate how the different countries have managed the pandemic. Specifically, we propose an assurance region benefit-of-the-doubt (AR-BoD) model, which operates in two stages corresponding to an unconditional and conditional analysis. In the conditional model, we propose a further refinement of the model, since we consider two types of variables that might affect countries’ performance—structural and discretionary. Results show that an accurate assessment of countries’ management of the pandemic benefits largely from operations research methods since we obtain benchmarks and find out how these benchmarks (or best practices) vary when contextual factors enter the análisis.