The seven countries with better coronavirus responses than Australia

While the coronavirus pandemic shows no sign of abating across the globe, Australia continues to manage the crisis well.

With two waves crushed, a relatively small outbreak at Christmas contained and a close call with the highly infectious UK variant avoided in Brisbane, we've clocked up 12 days without any locally acquired cases.

We are often said to be one of the exemplars of the global public health response (even if we do say so ourselves).

"If you'd asked me a year ago, can you imagine a circumstance where Australia was at zero cases but the world was at 630,000 cases in a day, I would have struggled to be so bold to have made that prediction, so our efforts are extraordinary," Health Minister Greg Hunt said on Friday.

So when the Lowy Institute released its analysis of the countries with the most effective pandemic response, some were surprised to see Australia scraping into the top 10 at number eight.

The think tank tracked six measures in 98 countries for 36 weeks after the country's 100th confirmed case. The Institute's Herve Lemahieu told the ABC that there wasn't one particular type of country that had stemmed the tide, but there seemed to be an advantage for smaller countries.

"One of the remarkable findings of this study is that there has been more or less a level playing field between developing and rich countries," he said.

Despite their success, the top 10 is a warning against complacency — with the New Zealand travel bubble suspended this week and Vietnam recording its worst single-day coronavirus outbreak so far.

So what lessons can we learn from the seven countries that trumped us?

New Zealand

Special weapon: An elimination strategy

Like many of the countries who nailed their pandemic response, New Zealand is an island. But the key factor in the country's success was how hard and fast it moved to lock down the population following early cases.

Unlike Australia, which aimed to "suppress" the virus, New Zealand went for elimination from the outset. And after seven weeks of lockdown, the country emerged virus-free. Clear communication from health authorities, including through text messages, was credited for prompting a positive response from the general public.

New Zealand was also an early adopter of genomic sequencing, which showed the strict lockdown began working almost immediately: in the first week, transmission dropped from seven contacts of an infected case, on average, to 0.2.

While tight borders have harmed New Zealand's tourism sector, they've allowed the island nation to remain largely COVID-free, minimising the hit to other industries.

Vietnam

Special weapon: A low-tech, hard and fast response

Vietnam went more than half a year without a single death from COVID-19. The country's approach has shown a low-tech response can be just as effective at containing the virus.

Vietnam forced hundreds of thousands of people into quarantine, even barricading off streets where infected people lived. Human rights organisations sounded the alarm at the draconian approach, but it proved effective in stamping out outbreaks.

In mid-March 2020, face masks became mandatory outside of the home and there was little resistance from a population well-versed in disease outbreaks.

One of the ways Vietnam made resources go further was through "pool testing".

This involves pooling a portion of multiple samples together for testing, and then if any viral fragments are detected, retesting the samples individually to identify the infected person.

This allowed for faster testing and meant supplies could stretch much further. During an outbreak in the tourist city of Da Nang, around a third of the city's households were tested, according to the WHO.

And then there were the jingles, like this public health message that went viral.

Taiwan

Special weapon: Extensive public health infrastructure and experience with SARS

When the pandemic reached Taiwan, the government leapt into action. With SARS still fresh in the national memory, they weren't taking any chances.

The country owes much of its success to its extensive public health network, which allowed it to quickly activate testing, quarantine and contact-tracing, achieving elimination in the community in April without a lockdown.

The country's immigration and health insurance agencies integrated their databases so they could quickly identify who should be tested based on their travel and medical histories.

Health authorities partnered with telecommunications companies to enforce quarantine through mobile phone location tracking. They also collaborated with two tech companies to create a chatbot so citizens could report their health status and seek advice.

Taiwan quickly ramped up mask production, establishing 60 production lines in 25 days, with the country able to produce more 20 million masks a day by the end of May.

Thailand

Special weapon: An army of volunteers

Thailand is facing a second wave that's spread among the overcrowded accommodation of migrant workers from Myanmar. But many in the country aren't panicking, based on Thailand's early success in containing the pandemic.

Like Taiwan, Thailand has a strong public health network with a unique advantage: a largely female army of volunteers with basic medical training.

These volunteers, spread across the country, went door-to-door over the course of 2020, educating households on how to prevent transmission, dispelling misinformation, offering masks and sanitiser, and providing updates on public health measures.

They also triaged cases, sending people with symptoms off for testing, and enforced quarantine orders.

This, combined with lockdowns and sophisticated screening at airports and other public places, gave Thailand an advantage in suppressing COVID-19.

Cyprus

Special weapon: Border controls and lockdowns

Another island state, Cyprus's success in containing the pandemic owes much to border controls, which have heavily impacted its tourist sector. From relatively early in the pandemic, arrivals had to prove they were virus-free before arriving.

The country has also been happy to impose restrictions, such as the nearly three-month lockdown imposed in mid-March that crushed the virus.

While the infection rate remained low through the initial months of the pandemic, a recent surge in infections has seen Cyprus hit more cases than Australia, and the country has returned to lockdown.

Rwanda

Special weapon: Public trust in the health system

As some of its neighbours battle a caseload 10 times higher, Rwanda has been a low-key COVID success story, with about 14,600 cases and 186 deaths.

Agnes Binagwaho, an architect of the country's health system, told the BMJ in December that Rwandans trust their health system.

"So, when the government closes the borders and sends everyone home—when it deploys health workers to people's homes, robots to their treatment centres, and drones to their skies [as it has done] — the people must know these actions are not against them, but for them. That's the only way they'll comply with the guidance—enforcement gets you only so far," she said.

The country's "patient-centric" response and community engagement has been held up as a reason for Rwanda's success, despite it lacking some of the resources of richer countries.

"COVID-19 has shown that the Western world and the global north are not the best at doing everything. It's time to revisit why they're doing what they're doing," she said.

"The culture of individualism, the lack of solidarity—it's losing trust with the people. And it's making people sick."

Iceland

Special weapon: Sophisticated and widespread testing

Iceland's tiny population of 368,000 allowed it to carry out widespread community testing.

Unlike other European nations that restricted testing to people with symptoms, Iceland cast an open invitation for any of its citizens to be tested. Around 13 per cent of those who initially came forward tested positive. Nearly half of those infections were asymptomatic, which revolutionised understanding of the virus.

Scientists also tracked the symptoms that confirmed cases experienced, and discovered muscle aches, headaches and a dry cough were most common, despite the public focus on fever.

More than half the Icelandic population were tested for COVID-19 in 2020. With an understanding of the full scope of community transmission, the country has been able to manage outbreaks while keeping its borders open to many countries.

Editor's note, February 4: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Vietnam's pool sampling used a single swab to test multiple people. Pool testing or sampling pools samples after not during collection.