The study examined which countries met four of the World Health Organisation’s six recommendations for relaxing their physical distancing measures.

Those recommendations include having Covid-19 transmission controlled “to a level of sporadic cases and clusters of cases, all from known contact” or at a minimum reduced to a level that the health system can cope with, ensuring sufficient public health workforce is in place for track and trace efforts and making sure the risk of exporting and importing cases from communities with high transmission case is minimised, the National said.

The countries ranked in the top 10 on their preparedness were New Zealand, Greenland, Rwanda, Taiwan, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Seychelles, Slovak Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Vietnam.

Cyprus is in the process of rolling back all restrictions this month, with most recent coronavirus cases concerning repatriated individuals. It has drawn a list of 29 countries from where people can travel to the island under certain conditions.

Oxford then puts together a “lockdown rollback table” based on data from the recommendations combined with epidemiological information from the European Centre for Disease Control, as well as Apple and Google travel and mobility stats.

“As of June 1, 2020, we estimate that only a handful of countries come close to meeting the four WHO recommendations we were able to estimate with the OxCGRT data, however there are about 30-50 which are close on several measures,” the researchers were quoted as saying.

The UK, which is Cyprus’ main tourism market, came in 191st place in the study of 195 countries. It has been left out of the list of 21 countries.

Source: Cyprus Mail