The Index deliberately uses a COVID-19 risk framework that considers all key factors that have a bearing on a country’s overall risk from COVID-19, distinguishing those that influence a country’s ability to:
- Stay alert to pandemics in other countries
- Delay the ‘spark’ of the virus entering the country
- Contain the community transmission of the virus once it has penetrated its borders
- To treat those infected with the virus
- To mitigate outbreaks via immunity, and
- To recover from the COVID-19
It is within this broad contextual framework, that those factors related to water security in various ways are highlighted. This approach allows the most effective water-related interventions to be identified at any given ‘phase’ of the epidemic within a country and recognises that prevention is more cost-effective than treatment.
An analysis of the factors contributing to a country’s overall COVID-19 risk index allows the relative importance of those factors related to water security to be identified. In this way, the Index can highlight those water interventions that are likely to have the most impact on reducing the overall impact of a pandemic like COVID-19. Like any index, its value for prioritising investments is predicated on the availability and accuracy of metrics measuring the factors currently believed to be important for reflecting the impact of a pandemic such as COVID-19 at the country scale. Metrics were not available for some key factors known to be important, such as a country’s ability to measure levels of immunity within the community, so these could not be incorporated at this stage.
