Brookings Institution: Do countries have immune systems? 5 lessons from fragile states to help fight the coronavirus
Paul M. Bisca, a security and development adviser currently on a consulting assignment with the World Bank, outlines lessons learned from development work in fragile states that could be applied to the COVID-19 response (3/24).

Council on Foreign Relations: What a Global Health Survey Found Months Before the Coronavirus Pandemic
Lindsay Maizland, writer and editor at CFR, and colleagues discuss pandemic preparedness among countries prior to COVID-19, as well as how the countries are faring during the pandemic. They write, “Last year, a group of the world’s top public health security researchers warned that no country was fully prepared for a pandemic. The spread of a new coronavirus has shown that they were right. The 2019 Global Health Security Index showed that international preparedness for a health crisis was weak. The index, a project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and the Economist Intelligence Unit, assesses 195 countries’ health security and capabilities. Researchers answered 140 questions about each country using publicly available data and gave each country a score. … But how have countries measured up against the real-life crisis posed by the coronavirus pandemic? Here’s how their scores compare to their responses…” (3/24).