Covid-19 in Mauritius and other Tourist paradises: a progress report

- 20 May 2020

Trade topics: COVID 19

The pandemic brings new information every day.  Factors contributing to the large differences in trajectories are the subject of intense investigation (e.g. Helsinki Graduate School of Economics Situation Room 2020).  This column summarises findings from our study of island states that have received relatively little attention (Melo et al. 2020). We cover the Mauritian case in some detail, and compare it with 19 other island states from Our World in Data (OWD) with populations in the range of 100,000 to 10 million. The sharing of common characteristics across islands, limiting the sample to islands not exceeding 10 million people, is a first-pass crude attempt at ‘apples versus apples’ comparisons.  Since some islands still have active cases, this is a progress report. We start with Mauritius, which closed all cases within 40 days (but see concluding paragraph), and then show that other islands that acted early, taking tough lockdowns with relatively long containment periods, have exited recently. 

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