The coronavirus first emerged in China during the end of 2019 as cases of pneumonia of an unknown cause started to accumulate between the end of December 2019 and mid-January 2020; the Chinese authorities have since then identified a new strain of the coronavirus on the 7th of January 2020. The World Health Organization has classified COVID-19 as a pandemic on the 11th of March 2020.

Since then and until the 7th of April 2020, more than 200 countries and territories have recorded cases of the new virus. Total confirmed cases amount to more than 1.2 Million, and total deaths amount to more than 72,000. During the early days of the outbreak, confirmed cases were mostly concentrated in the Western Pacific Region, specifically China, as shown in Figure 1, and that began to change as the virus began spreading, making the two new centers of the outbreak the United States and Europe.

As the spread and evolution of the virus differ from one country to another and based on the assumption that the main determinants of a country's success in limiting the spread of the virus are the measures taken by the government along with their timings, we will review the measures taken by Saudi Arabia that aim to limit the spread of COVID-19 relative to other countries, by comparing the measures taken and the resulting outcomes.