Global Finance Magazine released its “World’s Safest Countries 2021” report in which it ranked 134 countries in the world in terms of the level of safety and security each is characterized by. In details, the safety index score the report uses to produce country rankings is the average of three equally-weighted fundamental safety factors, namely, war and peace (deduced from spread and frequency of war, conflict, and terrorism-related incidents), personal security (mainly inferred from crime rates), and natural disaster risk (defined in reference to the geographic location). The 2021 edition of the report also encompasses some unique factors resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. In this vein, the report revealed that the COVID-19 criteria weighs death per capita (is derived from how successfully a country is able to respond to the spread of the virus) from the disease twice as heavily as the fundamental factors, while also providing equal weight to vaccinations per capita (reflect a country’s performance with regards to preventive measures taken to prevent future outbreaks) to the weight given to fundamental factors. Therefore, the report stated that the overall score is divided as follows: half on fundamental factors, one-third on COVID-19 deaths per capita and one-sixth on COVID vaccination per capita. Accordingly, the lower the overall safety index score, the less the threats and risks existing in a specific nation and thus the safer that nation is and vice versa. The report unveiled that the COVID-19 pandemic has altered the countries’ rankings in the 2021 report, with several developed and developing countries that poorly handled the crisis seeing their rankings drop sizably. The report also stated that the COVID-19 pandemic has presented new challenges for governments worldwide and has changed the way safety in countries is measured. Furthermore, the report commented that the 2021 rankings need to be viewed carefully when compared to previous editions of the report since the COVID-19 death tolls and the vaccination rates are based on self-reporting by governments, noting that some countries are unable to gather all the necessary data.

In figures, Iceland topped the list of the World’s Safest Countries for the year 2021 with an overall safety index score of 3.97, followed by the United Arab Emirates (safety index score: 4.20), and Qatar (safety index score: 4.56). Bahrain came third among its Arab peers, ranking 12^th worldwide and scoring 6.81 in the safety index, followed by Kuwait (global rank: 18; safety index score: 7.65), Saudi Arabia (global rank: 19; safety index score: 7.69), and Morocco (global rank: 24; safety index score: 8.05). As far as Lebanon is concerned, the country ranked before last in the region and 118^th globally with an overall safety index score of 12.88. Lebanon was preceded by Tunisia (global rank: 93; safety index score: 11.31) and followed by Yemen (global rank: 126; safety index score: 13.77).