The ongoing outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 has been deeply impacting health systems worldwide. In this context, it
is pivotal to measure the efficiency of different nations’ response to the pandemic, whose insights can be used
by governments and health authorities worldwide to improve their national COVID-19 strategies. Hence, we
propose a network Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to estimate the efficiencies of fifty-five countries in the
current crisis, including the thirty-seven Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
member countries, six OECD prospective members, four OECD key partners, and eight other countries. The
network DEA model is designed as a general series structure with five single-division stages – population,
contagion, triage, hospitalisation, and intensive care unit admission –, and considers an output maximisation
orientation, denoting a social perspective, and an input minimisation orientation, denoting a financial
perspective. It includes inputs related to health costs, desirable and undesirable intermediate products related to
the use of personal protective equipment and infected population, respectively, and desirable and undesirable
outputs regarding COVID-19 recoveries and deaths, respectively. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this
is the first study proposing a cross-country efficiency measurement using a network DEA within the context
of the COVID-19 crisis. The study concludes that Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and
New Zealand are the countries exhibiting higher mean system efficiencies. Their national COVID-19 strategies
should be studied, adapted, and used by countries exhibiting worse performances. In addition, the observation
of countries with large populations presenting worse mean efficiency scores is statistically significant.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio