New research has revealed that COVID-19 recovery rate in GCC countries is significantly higher than the global average
According to the latest CoronaTracker.com figures, an average of 81.4 per cent of cases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Oman have recovered – well above the global figure of 57 per cent.
Each GCC member country also individually scored well above the global average. Bahrain led the group with 89.2 per cent followed by Kuwait (84.2 per cent), the UAE (86.8 per cent), Saudi Arabia (80.2 per cent) and Oman (66.7 per cent).
The website provides data from a variety of international media and public agencies, including the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Disease Control and Prevention Centres, and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
Dr Waleed Khalifa Al Manea, an undersecretary at the Ministry of Health and member of The Taskforce, commented, “International praise for our work from the World Health Organisation is evidence that we have taken the right approach to tackle the virus. This should be an incentive to remain resilient as national containment efforts continue.”
The GCC has earlier earned praise from the WHO for its early, rapid, and robust collective response to the outbreak.
Bahrain was one of the world’s first countries to shut down all educational institutions, from kindergartens to universities, and to take swift action on ground flights until there were quarantine facilities.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia banned foreign pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca before even one case of infection had been registered. By mid-March, each member of the GCC had schools and universities shut down, with non-essential businesses to follow. Almost every member country had suspended international passenger flights by the end of March.
Equally crucial has been technological innovation and digital connectivity. In the UAE, police deployed smart helmets capable of scanning hundreds of people's temperatures every minute.
Bahrain, meanwhile, has used multilingual robots on isolation wards to check body temperatures, administer medicines, serve meals and sterilise treatment rooms with beams of ultraviolet light. Both Bahrain and the UAE lead much of the world in testing rates, ranking fifth and sixth respectively globally for rate of tests per million people.
