Covid-19 was predicted to hit emerging markets particularly hard, as many containment measures were deemed less effective in an emerging market context. This column examines emerging market sovereign credit default swaps spreads during the pandemic and assesses the relative importance of global factors, sovereign fundamentals, COVID-19 mortality, and policy responses. The analysis suggests that while emerging market sovereign CDS spreads can be explained by regional and global risk factor before COVID-19, they were driven by fiscal space, commodity revenues and mobility dynamics during the pandemic, but not directly through variation in country-specific COVID-19 mortality rates.