‘Trump, Xi should be held accountable for their handling of Covid-19 pandemic’

In my opinion the world’s two greatest misleaders are China’s Xi Jinping and the United States’ Donald Trump. According to a report published on News.com.au recently, researchers from the University of Southampton believe China could have cut the number of cases of coronavirus by an astonishing 95 per cent, if Wuhan, the source of the virus, was locked down three weeks sooner. Yet President Xi Jinping’s regime denied the epidemic outbreak until January 21, which by then the virus had spread to the rest of China and to most of the world.

Personally, I believe this suppression of news, coupled with the failure to lock down Wuhan then and non-intervention for three weeks, makes Xi Jinping responsible for infecting over two million people and the 145,410 deaths world-wide by April 17, 2020. The numbers are growing exponentially daily.

In the meantime, President Trump, against all the staggering evidence of the spreading of the virus and expert advice, delayed action in the US even longer than his counterpart Xi Jinping did in China. US Intelligence agencies sounded the alarm in January and February, but for 70 days Trump denied and actively mislead the American public about the exploding pandemic.

On March 13, Trump declared a national emergency over the virus. The declaration would have required him to take over the leadership of management of the crisis from the states and provide centralised, coordinated national leadership. Yet even though he boasted he was now a war-time president, I personally feel Trump is consistently ‘missing in action’.

He has refused to lead and continues to mislead. He has failed to take responsibility for providing ventilators, protective masks and clothing to emergency staff. He refused to issue a nationwide stay-home order. He declared he would not wear a protective mask and keeps blaming the states for shortages of treatment supplies.

In the absence of a centralised emergency command, there are only patchwork interventions by the federal government, with one arm of the government not knowing what the other is doing. For example, Trump boasted at a recent press conference that the army would provide 100,000 masks to hospitals directly to cut through red tape and relieve the shortage of masks in hospitals, but in fact the masks were to be sent to a store that was to sell the masks to any bidders on the commercial market.

On March 30, Trump declared that if his administration kept the death toll from Covid-19 to 100,000, it will have done “a very good job” — a startling shift from his optimistic predictions a few days earlier when he bragged that he hoped to see churches filled with worshippers and the economy restarted by Easter. As of April 17 the death toll from the virus in the state of New York alone is nearly 15,000, threatening to overwhelm the state’s morgue capacity.

It is still not openly admitted in the US, that multi-millions of Americans could be killed by coronavirus. To people who have chronic diseases Covid-19 is a lethal threat. From the research I’ve done, chronic diseases affect approximately 133 million Americans, representing more than 40 per cent of the total population of the country. In spite of such a looming threat, several states have still not required citizens to stay at home.

Add to this that the vast majority of the population still has not been tested for the virus and testing kits are in short supply and it is clear that the pandemic is being allowed to exponentially infect an ever greater portion of the US population.

State governors and mayors complain daily that the federal government isn’t doing enough to unify the country in following guidelines, provide medical supplies or generally lead the US through an unprecedented crisis.

Despite Trump’s compounding the national crisis and causing increasing number of preventable deaths by the failure of his leadership, his national popularity has soared to 60 per cent. In my opinion, this is only explicable by the incredible ignorance of the majority of the American electorate and by the majority’s reliance on Fox News, which is a propaganda platform for Trump and the Republican Party.

In the meantime in China, Xi Jinping’s regime is continuing to claim that they have the pandemic under control. However independent research I have read suggests that the number of deaths in Wuhan alone is 16 times higher than what has been admitted to officially.

While Trump’s ‘Dad’s Army’ has made the US increasingly withdrawn from and irrelevant to leading the world, Xi Jinping is working hard to reposition his autocracy from being seen as the cause of the world’s pandemic tragedy to one as the foremost helper of the hardest hit countries. In a masterstroke of upstaging strategy, while Trump failed to address New York State’s critical shortage of ventilators, Xi gifted New York with a thousand of these.

In my opinion, both Trump and Xi care more about staying in power than human lives. Xi began to order people back to work even though the pandemic is still spreading and people are still dying because of it in China. And Trump is also itching to get people back to work even though experts warn that a premature end to staying at home could worsen the pandemic.

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