Battling Covid-19 in US and beyond: From containment to mitigation

WHEN 50 years from now, US historians try to explain why so many Americans fell victim to the Covid-19 pandemic, President Donald Trump will undoubtedly shoulder a lot of the blame in their narratives, in the same way that President Herbert Hoover is regarded today as a leading villain in the chronicles of the 20th century's Great Depression.

One way to put it is - the 45th US president was asleep at the helm during the first two months of this year, when Americans were following from afar the tragedy unfolding in Wuhan, as a mysterious virus was taking the lives of so many Chinese.

The Trump administration was then in a position to start taking early steps to ensure containment of the virus in the United States, seeking to detect instances of Covid-19 that began to appear in the country, tracing the contacts of sick people and encouraging them to quarantine themselves. But the Trump administration, not unlike the officials in Wuhan, was not ready and initially tried to play down the threat of the virus.