The unprecedented shock brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic and its potential effect on poverty, pushed for an expansion in the social policy response frontier and most countries were able to rapidly expand social protection and assistance using diverse tools. Will this unprecedented response pave the way to building stronger, more inclusive social protection systems? Can these systems take diverse forms given the local contexts and constraints; or are universal systems, rooted in complex institutional arrangements, the final benchmark to which developing countries should aspire? This brief examines the social policy responses aimed at protecting income and job losses implemented amidst the pandemic. A rich dataset has been exploited to characterize the breadth of countries’ policy responses by building an index that reflects the diversity of policies implemented, amongst all those available, in terms of social assistance, social insurance, and the labour market. This analysis offers a qualitative approach on whether governments’ actions were comprehensive or narrow, conditional on the fiscal efforts and the stringency of the containment measures.