How cities around the world are handling COVID-19 - and why we need to measure their preparedness

Mar 17, 2020

A general view of empty Plaza de Catalunya (Catalonia Square) during partial lockdown as part of a 15-day state of emergency to combat the coronavirus disease outbreak, in Barcelona, Spain March 16, 2020. REUTERS/Nacho Doce - RC2YKF9E4O83

An empty Plaza de Catalunya in Barcelona during a partial lockdown of the city as part of a 15-day state of emergency to combat coronavirus Image: REUTERS/Nacho Doce

Robert Muggah

Co-founder, SecDev Group and Co-founder, Igarapé Institute

Rebecca Katz

Director, Center for Global Health Science and Security, Georgetown University

Our Impact

The Big Picture

Explore and monitor how COVID-19 is affecting economies, industries and global issues

A hand holding a looking glass by a lake

Crowdsource Innovation

Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale

Stay up to date:

COVID-19

The share of the population that is urbanized across the world Image: Our World in Data

The ReadyScore is a measurement of a country's ability to find, stop and prevent health threats. Green indicates a country is better prepared, yellow means there is work to do, red indicates Image: Prevent Epidemics

Don't miss any update on this topic

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.