Opinion | Why Trump blaming China for the coronavirus pandemic is a waste of time and energy

Name: ‘I’m a little upset with China’, some of Trump’s more memorable quotes on the coronavirus pandemic
Uploaded: 2020-12-13T17:15:10.000Z
Duration: 2 min 35 s
Description: ‘I’m a little upset with China’, some of Trump’s more memorable quotes on the coronavirus pandemic

Pointing fingers at China is less likely to get it to cooperate and more likely to make it defensive. The bottom line is that Beijing needs to be engaged and not isolated – China is not the problem, it is a critical part of the solution

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Why you can trust SCMP

Charles R. Stith

Published: 1:15am, 14 Dec 2020Updated: 1:27am, 14 Dec 2020

When I am on the road, it’s not unusual for me to fall asleep with the television on. A few days ago, in the early hours, I awoke to a CNN “Breaking News” story. The lead was “secret documents reveal China mishandled the early stages of the pandemic.” This was almost one year to the day from when the first case of Covid-19 was identified.

Enough already. US President Donald Trump has already tried blaming China for the pandemic and the chaos that followed. That dog did not hunt then and it will not hunt now. To continue down this road is, at best, a waste of time. At worst, it is a distraction that prevents us from dealing with root issues relative to Covid-19 and getting started on a serious global economic recovery.

Let me drill down a little further as to why the China blame game is a non-starter. Forget the CNN story for a minute. The fact is, the crisis is not China’s fault.

In late December, China acted quickly in identifying the virus and shared pertinent information as it had been vetted. On the other hand, a study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research indicated there might have been Covid-19 cases in the United States as early as December 2019, before China identified the virus and did the analysis to come up with the genome code.

Does that mean we should now blame the United States for not taking this disease more seriously? We could, but what is the point?

02:35

‘I’m a little upset with China’, some of Trump’s more memorable quotes on the coronavirus pandemic

The more critical point here is the assumption that we can identify a sentinel case, then track and trace it. That’s a practical impossibility in this day and age.

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