BELIZE CITY, Wed. Apr. 29, 2020– Using 13 publicly available information indexes by governments regarding their response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the measures they implemented, Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford has been conducting a series of studies.

In one of the studies having to do with which countries are most ready to exit their COVID-19 lockdown, Belize was rated at number 5.

Interestingly, the Belize Government just passed a new law extending the country’s lockdown to two months. It is expected that tomorrow, Thursday, the Barrow government will introduce new Statutory Instruments which may provide some easing of restrictions under the national State of Emergency which came into effect on April 1.

The study is based on what is termed as the country’s Lockdown Resilience Checklist of the Oxford COVID-19 Government Tracker.

“The tracker aggregates the policy scores (not the financial scores) into a common ‘Stringency Index’. Note that this index simply records the number and strictness of government policies, and should not be interpreted as ‘scoring’ the appropriateness or effectiveness of a country’s response. A higher position in the Stringency Index does not necessarily mean that a country’s response is ‘better’ than others or lower,” the school’s webpage on the study said.