World's first holistic index on COVID-19 launched

Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI) Khairy Jamaluddin said the index could pull together metrics from well-recognised and validated open-source databases on governance and public healthcare, while it could comprehensively assess the true severity and recovery progress of the countries.

"The GCI comprises the Severity Index and the Recovery Index, in which the former measures the severity of the situation in a given country against the ability of its healthcare system to contain the outbreak, while the latter measures on how well a country is handling the crisis from a health and safety perspective.

"It also rates and ranks 184 countries based on how well they are coping with COVID-19 pandemic, in which the GCI is poised to be a singular holistic source of data that can facilitate informed decision-making for governments all around the world in the fight against COVID-19," he said in his keynote address during the launching ceremony of GCI.

Khairy also mentioned that the GCI could be a powerful tool to help government to make critical decisions to fight the pandemic, and it could also be an indicator for the private sectors to resume regular operations or whether they should prepare a mitigation plan.

"This index is updated daily to help countries around the world plan their best strategies in dealing with COVID-19 and to learn the best practices from countries recovering from the outbreak.

"The GCI will be an open platform to facilitate fast-learning between countries and organisations based on Big Data and Open Science," he said.

The GCI is an international collaboration between MOSTI, PEMANDU Associates, Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health, Academy of Sciences Malaysia, World Health Organisation (WHO) and Sunway University.

After the launching ceremony, a webinar session was held featuring experts in health systems, public sector as well as epidemiological presentations from institutions such as the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health and WHO to discuss how Big Data and technology could be used strategically to combat COVID-19.