Why Is Portugal Different?

You may not be aware of it but the Portuguese experience during the COVID-19 epidemic has been somewhat different from its neighbors as the following table shows:

Country	Cases	Cases/million	Deaths	Deaths/million
Portugal	24,027	2,356	928	91
Spain	232,128	4,965	23,822	510
France	165,842	2,541	23,293	357
UK	157,149	2,315	21,092	311

Portugal’s strategy in responding to COVID-19 has differed somewhat from those of its neighbors. In summary it closed off its nursing homes to protect the most vulnerable and initiated additional measures to prevent the staffs of those facilities from transmitting the virus to their residents, it created triage units adjoining hospitals to screen COVID-19 cases, and it granted guest workers and asylum-seekers complete access to all measures used to deal with the disease.

According to this article, the Portuguese attribute their relative success to

• They had an additional week to prepare for the virus relative to Spain
• Strong “civic spirit” bolstered by a sense of national identity, what I would characterize as social cohesion
• Largely voluntary compliance with their “lockdown” directives

I believe that a very simple model with just three parameters (population density in the largest city, number of travelers to/from China in January, latitude) provides a fair first order approximation of the number of COVID-19 cases in any given country or state and that the number of deaths can largely be inferred from the number of cases with variations for demographics and differing national responses. Under the circumstances Portugal has clearly responded pretty successfully.

But has Portugal been prudent or just lucky or both? Portugal’s economy is less interconnected with China’s than its neighbors. Does that play a role in the difference?