Covid-19 Best countries June 2020 where are they Feb 2021

Introduction

In June 2020 TIME magazine published a report ":Which countries handled COVID-19 best". The countries included were: Argentina, Australia, Canada, Greece, Iceland, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United Arab Emirates, with an honorable mention to Germany. We are interested in seeing how well the  TIME June 2020 countries are doing today (Feb 2021)

Status June 2020

Below is a table of the cumulative cases and deaths from the TIME report, to which we have added the cumulative cases/million population and the ratio of cumulative deaths/cases for June 22, 2020 from the Johns Hopkins data.

Status February 2021

Here we use the data from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) (see https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/master/csse_covid_19_data/csse_covid_19_time_series/time_series_covid19_confirmed_global.csv and 

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/master/csse_covid_19_data/csse_covid_19_time_series/time_series_covid19_deaths_global.csv).

Confirmed cases

Charts of cumulative cases per million population and daily cases per million population below indicate:

• Although Argentina, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Canada, Iceland and Greece according to the TIME magazine were among the best countries in June 2020 they have all ran into continued increases in confirmed cases since.
• Singapore after a poor start managed to dramatically limit increases in confirmed cases starting in August 2020.
• South Korea has been doing well though it is currently seeing a third surge in cases.
• After a couple of surges, the island nations of New Zealand and Australia have successfully limited confirmed cases.
• Right from the beginning, the island nation of Taiwan has managed to do an amazing job of limiting confirmed cases.

It is interesting that the island nations Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia have performed very well while Iceland has had a rockier time.

Deaths

The deaths show similar results, i.e.:

• Taiwan, Singapore, and New Zealand followed by South Korea and Australia are the best performers.
• The worst off are Argentina, Germany, Greece and Canada followed by the United Arab Emirates and Iceland.

Comparison of TIME's best countries in Jun 2020 with JHU's overall worst countries  in Feb 2021

Looking at TIME magazine's best countries in June 2020, and choosing those with the highest cumulative confirmed cases / million population in August 2020 and Feb 2021 yields Argentina, Germany and Canada. Comparing these three with countries from the  26 leading countries with  cumulative confirmed cases / million population  and selecting those countries with >= 3.9 million population representing, Central Europe (the Czech Republic), West Asia (Israel), Central Asia (Georgia), South America  (Brazil), West Europe (Portugal), Central America (Panama) and North America (US) we see the following:

Another way of looking at this is via the ranking of countries by Cumulative Confirmed cases per million population. The ranking for the TIME magazine's best countries in June 2020 is seen in the following table summarizing the data for these countries as seen on 2/11/2021. The  data is ordered by Cumulative Confirmed cases / million population (Mpop), and the rank is also by Cumulative Confirmed cases / million population.

Even the TIME magazine country (Argentina) with the highest Cumulative Confirmed cases per million population on February 11, 2021, when ranked together with all 164 reported countries is not in the top 15% of the 164  countries.