Can a fragmented world stop a coronavirus pandemic?
SINGAPORE - China locks down tens of millions in their homes to slow the march of a deadly virus - but furnishes scant information about the mercurial spread of a disease that has spooked the world.
South Korea and Singapore opt to track patients' movements in granular detail, favoring radical transparency over privacy. In Italy and Iran, politicians trade blame over rapidly growing outbreaks that are seeping across unstable regions, making a global pandemic seemingly inevitable. Infections appear in Mexico. Then Nigeria.
As the world unites in resolve to battle the deadly virus that causes COVID-19, it is doing so with as many as 195 separate playbooks, each country calibrating its emergency measures to suit domestic and international politics, local capacity, cultural norms and other considerations that have little to do with public health.
The result is a global response that can appear uneven, inchoate and at times dangerous, with neighboring countries adopting different strategies to similar threats across a closely connected planet.
"Unfortunately we are only as prepared
