Pretty quickly, it became clear that COVID-19 would take command if someone else didn’t. Deliberate leadership was needed now or, really, yesterday. Scientists and medical professionals saw it coming. Yet despite their forewarnings of a looming pandemic just like this, most countries remained underprepared, including those with robust plans and infrastructures.

The basic weapons of viral defense were no mystery: testing, tracing, washing hands and covering faces, social (physical) distancing, and other devices now intimate to us all. Little was yet known about COVID-19, and dwindling stockpiles of personal protective equipment and ventilators were setting off alarm bells, but these things we could do, theoretically.

Knowing what to do is only half the battle, as any student of science, health, or risk communication will tell you. The steeper climb is educating and persuading people to comply, or maneuvering politics toward effective public policy. Like it or not, these social realities control whether we flatten that curve (because they’re physical realities too). With wide eyes, many of us discovered what experts already knew. It is no simple matter to mitigate a virus, even when you have the right tools.

And so we learned the hard way, as nations reacted differently, the virus adapted, and the international comparisons began. The US and UK—ironically ranked #1 and #2, respectively, on the Global Health Security Index published just before the outbreak—floundered hard, as did Mexico, Brazil, Russia, India, and many others. Meanwhile, countries as diverse as South Korea, New Zealand, Taiwan, Senegal, Thailand, Finland, and Rwanda emerged as initial success stories to watch.

Commentators scrambled to account for the dramatic differences, some pointing to national culture. Collectivism and fatalism in South Korea may have facilitated favorable behavior, for example, whereas American individualism and optimism bred high tolerance for risk and low compliance with restrictions. Maybe the US and UK, for all their acclaimed plans, were felled by faith in their own exceptionalism. After all, several of the countries doing well had to confront their vulnerability in prior pandemics, and those lessons were now institutionalized.

International leadership patterns began to catch the eye, and two in particular gained steam. First, states governed by populist “strongmen” appeared to be fumbling the worst. Second, nations with women at the helm seemed to be faring better.