The U.S. death toll from the coronavirus climbed past 3,500 Tuesday, eclipsing China’s official count, as New York’s mammoth convention center started taking patients to ease the burden on the city’s overwhelmed health system and the tennis center where the U.S. Open is held was being turned into a hospital.
Winning the legal argument, China has learnt from the history of great power relations, is very much part of great power jousting. The negative lessons are from the Soviet Union that dismissed the Western legal arguments during the Cold War as based on the logic of capital and empire. That did not convert many beyond the choir.
Trump sided with the White House doctors over its economists, at least for now, the decision shed light on a West Wing beset with divisions and a commander in chief torn between an instinct to embrace the image of a wartime president fighting an invisible enemy and the desire to protect the nation’s bottom line as he barrels into a bruising reelection fight.
India’s chaotic attempt to go into a lockdown to combat the coronavirus has had an unusual side-effect: it has the attention of the elites, ensconced in their homes during the three-week period, to the plight of the country’s massive migrant labour population.
The coronavirus pandemic could seriously disrupt global food supply chains and send prices soaring, especially for those economies with vulnerable supply structures, if major producing countries increase export restrictions, international agencies and food experts have warned.
In the next month, Trump must make the most consequential decisions of his presidency, including determining an appropriate time to relax the social-distancing guidelines his administration previously put in place to prevent widespread community transmission — a move he’s eyeing as he looks to reopen huge swaths of the country.
The timing could not have been worse for Russia to provoke a spat with Saudi Arabia over oil production quotas in early March. Moscow’s decision to withdraw from the OPEC+ agreement restricting oil production in order to maintain higher oil prices triggered a harsh reaction by Riyadh that sent oil prices spiralling down to below $25 per barrel in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
While the US’s $2 trillion stimulus bill is hogging headlines stateside, governments around the world are rolling out their own sweeping rescue packages in an effort to mitigate the economic consequences of COVID-19 containment efforts.
We are facing a crisis of historic proportions. But if what we are going through can indeed be called a war, it is certainly not a typical one. After all, today’s enemy is shared by all of humankind, and the mobilisation of state resources must go hand in hand with the demobilisation of most of the population.
A growing number of imported coronavirus cases in China, where the epidemic originated in December, risked fanning a second wave of infections when domestic transmissions had “basically been stopped”, a senior health official said on Sunday.
