The UAE and Bahrain became the first countries in the world with populations exceeding one million to reach a test rate of 50 per cent for COVID-19
The milestone figure means that scientists in the two GCC nations can analyse the spread of the pandemic more accurately with access to a higher level of per capita infection data than elsewhere in the world.
So far, only countries with small population sizes such as Monaco (38,000 pop.), Gibraltar (33k pop.) and the Falkland Islands (3k pop.) have succeeded in testing half of their residents and citizens.
The UK, meanwhile, has achieved a testing rate of 24.9 per cent while the US stands at 18.6 per cent. After the UAE (52.7 per cent) and Bahrain (50.3 per cent), Denmark (27.7 per cent) is the next country to achieve the benchmark figure followed by Singapore (25.2 per cent).
Testing has played a major part in the COVID-19 containment strategy for nations across the GCC, with all confirmed cases quarantined and treated.
In Bahrain, public buses have been converted into mobile testing units and citizens summoned for tests at random. At the same time, early interventions included screenings at entry points and restrictions on travel from high-risk areas. The island kingdom has also used multilingual robots on isolation wards to check body temperatures, administer medicines, serve meals and sterilise treatment rooms with beams of ultraviolet light.
All confirmed cases are quarantined and treated, with those unable to maintain social distancing at home accommodated in quarantine centres. As an additional precaution, those entering the kingdom are required to self-isolate for 10 days on arrival.
At the UAE, police have deployed smart helmets capable of scanning hundreds of people’s temperatures every minute.
Both Bahrain and the UAE lead much of the world in testing rates, ranking fifth and seventh respectively globally for rate of tests per million people.
It comes after research suggested that the COVID-19 recovery rate in GCC countries was significantly higher than the global average. An average of 75 per cent of cases have recovered in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Oman – well above the global figure of 57 per cent.
Each GCC member country also scored well above the global average individually. Bahrain led the group at 84 per cent, followed by Kuwait (81 per cent), the UAE (78 per cent), Saudi Arabia (70 per cent) and Oman (61 per cent).
The figures from CoronaTracker.com represent the percentage of a country’s citizens confirmed to have been infected by the virus who have made a full recovery.
With the global total of confirmed COVID-19 cases now well over 18.7 million and governments around the world bracing for a second wave of infections, the rate of recovery has emerged as an important metric for measuring the efficacy of the ongoing responses of countries to the pandemic.
