How will the US-China war of words and tariffs play out? President Trump’s administration is upping the ante with China. Ever since he moved into the White House, Trump has regularly injected bellicosity into the dialogue with China. There have also been several moments of professed bonhomie. That is in piece with the current US administration; it is hard to decipher its moves and even harder to predict the next bend in the road. But of late, the level of anti-China rhetoric has reached new levels, and it appears that this time a point of no return may be imminent. Or is it? Earlier this week, the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told media that the Novel Coronavirus had originated from a laboratory at Wuhan. The implication is damning. It means that Chinese scientists were the deliberate creators of the deadly virus that has brought the world on its knees. It debunks the original story of its origin from a bat or some other animal on sale in a market in Wuhan. It also wigg...
The earliest cases of the COVID-19 caused by a novel coronavirus were detected in January in China this year. But it has been only 7 weeks since the pandemic swept through the entire world, pockmarking map of the globe with red-blobs of varying size on almost every country. It isn’t the first pandemic to afflict the human race. Ancient Greece suffered from one deadly pandemic during the Peloponnesian War back in 430. It killed two-thirds of the population of Libya, Egypt, Ethiopia and Greece in an era when medical science was not even at its rudimentary, incipient stage of development. Since then, there has been a long list of causes that developed into full-blown pandemics, including Cholera, Plague, Measles, Flu that carried the prefix Russian, Spanish and Asian, SARS and, closer to the date, the HIV and AIDS. Each of these caused destruction of human life on a scale greater than the present calamity. And yet, it appears that COVID 19 has the potential of leaving a far bigge...