Daily Times

Now that the most significant man in the whole world, the president of the United States of America, has contracted the coronavirus the whole world is going to feel the effects of it. The first thing to suffer, even before the election campaign was officially grounded, was the international financial sector as capital markets tumbled across the world on the news. This would be a big thing even if it turns out to be the regular, not too harmful, kind of infection. But President Trump has everything going against him. He is in his mid-seventies, he’s above weight for his build, and he’s a male (which tend to suffer far more than females from Covid-19). And now that he’s been shifted to a military hospital, even though he says everything is fine, it has given rise to increased uncertainty which is known to translate very quickly into trauma in financial markets. So investors, who were already pricing in election risk, have that much more reason to be jittery.

The next 48 hours will tell a lot but the American establishment would already have begun making contingency plans for a possible worst case scenario. The other high-profile head of state to be effected by the virus was UK’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson who is a good twenty years or so Trump’s junior and still was lucky, in his own words, to escape with his life. Now, even if the US president makes a full recovery, hopefully very soon, there’s no telling yet how much his election campaign will be affected. And people will also want to know what will happen, again in the worst case scenario, if he’s no longer available for the poll. Who, then, will the Republican Party nominate for the positon and how will anybody get the job of effective campaigning done in such little time? In such a case everybody should also prepare for an absolute nose dive in the financial sector as, considering all the uncertainty, markets will bleed like they’ve seldom bled before.

The incident, serious though it is, isn’t without its fair share of irony either. Wasn’t President Trump sometimes the only man playing down the threat from the coronavirus all this time? The idea was no doubt pretty noble since he did not want people to panic or businesses to suffer, but in diluting the threat from a life-taking virus only amounts to putting people in harm’s way quite unnecessarily. He also flouted his own government’s safety rules all the time by refusing to wear a mask in public. Once he even said that he had a mask in his pocket but decided not to put it on because he didn’t want to give the press the satisfaction of seeing him wearing one. Such posturing would have gone out the window very quickly once he, and his wife, tested positive. Hopefully he will make a quick recovery and the whole world will be saved from needless trauma. *