Canada ranks worse than almost all developed countries in 'COVID-19 misery index'

COVID has made Canada one of the most miserable countries in the developed world, a new index says.

Out of 15 countries included in a study performed by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and published on Monday, Canada places a pitiful 11th.

While Canada, placed 6th on the list in terms of being able to contain the virus, it placed a miserable 13th and 14th on economic impact and pandemic response, respectively.

The only countries that ranked lower than Canada in this regard were Italy, France, the UK, and Spain.

According to the National Post, the index in total looked at 16 different parameters to make its determinations. These included, among others, mortality rates, vaccination rates, changes in GDP, unemployment rates, how limiting the lockdowns were and others. The final scores for each nation were from zero to 100.

Justin Trudeau's government scored well in the area of initially preventing spikes of the virus, but poorly in the fact that they wreaked havoc on the economy to do so.

According to the report, “While Canada was spared the worst ravages of the disease, our response to it has brought significant misery, largely attributable to quite strong restrictions in behaviour and a lagging vaccination program."

"The economic misery has been severe, and the projections are that Canadian taxpayers will be paying this bill for some time to come," the report continued, also stating that Canada's economic performance has been "significantly worse than average, indicating an inefficient, costly response."

Rick Audus, the creator of the study, stated:

"People talk about these things conceptually, we talk a lot about the pain and the suffering from the pandemic, the mental health issues, things like that, but I think it’s useful to actually sit down and look at the numbers as a whole. We want to be able to learn from this terrible, terrible series of events."