The abject failure of the administration is said to have magnified the crisis in the United States of America. The paradox has indeed been one of the puzzles of the coronavirus pandemic; the world’s richest country is said to be structurally ill-equipped to cope with the dreadful affliction.

Hence perhaps Donald Trump’s desperate appeal to Narendra Modi to clear shipments of the hydroxychloroquine ordered by the US after India last month banned the export of the drug. As China gradually recovers from the catastrophe, the US has stumbled over the past few weeks, emerging over the weekend as the worst sufferer of the affliction.

To the horrific extent that it is now the new centre of the pandemic, with more than a fifth of the million cases reported worldwide, and more than 5,000 deaths. The vast majority of Americans ~ more than 300 million – are now under some form of lockdown, albeit not uniformly stringent within the federal structure of the country.

Some measures have come a little too late; hospitals are now overwhelmed. The lack of universal healthcare or basic employment rights such as statutory sick pay, and the low incomes on which America’s poor survive, are conducive to the spread of the disease. As people and political leaders bare their angst amidst the misery, the criticism is largely targeted at President Trump.

More basically, in the year of the election, reports suggest that there has been an utter failure of leadership. The crisis is said to have been exacerbated ~ “turbocharged”, say the President’s detractors ~ by an utter failure of leadership.

The criticism points to what they call the lack of will, intelligence, basic competence or even consistency on the part of the Trump administration At the end of the day, America must give it to the State Governors and institutions, who have pre-empted the administration and gone far beyond it in taking action, recalling the experience of Brazil, where provincial heads have displayed greater initiative and enterprise in the face of President Bolsonaro’s negligence, almost criminal.

It strains credulity that Mr Trump has at best left the States to fend for themselves and at worst hindered the fight against coronavirus. It would perhaps be an understatement to debunk Mr Trump’s approach as the soul of irresponsibility. His culpability actually predates the virus’s emergence in China. The administration got rid of most of the staff who worked on identifying global health problems in China, while repeatedly attempting to slash funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A comprehensive document on battling pandemics, drawn up by the Barack Obama administration, was “thrown on to a shelf” by the Trump cabal. Only last October, an internal federal government report warned that the US was woefully underprepared and underfunded to tackle a virus without a cure. The economy is reeling , and not merely in the United States of America. But not every one faces an election in November.