AA Edit: Strong men no more

The irony of a parasitic pathogen upending the strong men of the western world is inescapable even as the Covid-19 has changed geopolitics and the global economy. A spicy outcome of a new world view is that the Chinese are quoting Abraham Lincoln to the free world as opposed to the old Western habit of reciting Tao or Sun Tzu in ongoing tussles with China. The gulf has now grown considerably bigger as the origin of the pandemic lies in the heart of a nation of which Napoleon once presciently said - "Let China sleep for when she wakes she will shake the world." No clearer sign of new equations there could be than in the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's confusing message suggesting something like ‘Ready, Steady, Slow’. Akin to pressing the accelerator while keeping a foot on the lockdown brakes, Boris left more questions than answers as UK seeks to grapple with the horns of a pointed dilemma in saving lives versus livelihoods. Doses of sunshine were recommended amid caveats against a second coronavirus wave even before the first is yet to subside.

There is, however, some ground to take a charitable view of a world leader who went to the brink with Covid-19 and lives to tell the tale.

Across the Atlantic, the man who defies all description shows it is possible to see victory in everything, including defeat, as a terrible mortality outnumbering that of a combined Europe plus Brexit-UK threatens to rise in USA.

The chutzpah of Donald Trump boasting of having fared better might have Republican admirers. Everyone else is quite confused on how to go about salvaging the economy even as epidemiologists and experts warn us that the virus threat is going to be around till at least 2022. Or, until a vaccine can promise to protect several billion people; perhaps, the billion-plus Chinese who seem to be better off after a tryst with a pandemic that is posing the biggest threat to the world since Adolf Hitler.