Flatten the curve. On a new Covid-19 (hit) severity.

Abstract During the health crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic the adagium was to ``flatten the curve". We investigate how well countries succeeded in this aim by constructing an appropriate severity measure. It is able to distinguish between countries that e.g. experienced identical overall mortality rates or attained equal case load peaks. More classical measures (like summation or maximum) neglect this and are therefore inappropriate to assess the resilience of a health care system nor pandemic policy ex post performance. For a set of 32 countries, based on the reported number of Covid-19 cases and deaths, we calculate the relative severity of the pandemic hitting each individual country. The flattening didn't go equally well in all countries. The difference in severity is large, with Norway being consistently the least severely hit by the pandemic (using deaths as indicator) during the whole observation period, while Hungary comes out as eventually being hit the hardest in our sample. Having constructed a sound (hit) severity measure that enables to differentiate between countries' performances, further research should relate these observed differences to the pre pandemic health care status and the sanitary measures or restrictions imposed during the pandemic; in order to reveal what measures help the most in what type of health care system and society.