Opinion | Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan: the real coronavirus world leaders

When I was made editor of The New Paper in Singapore in 1990, I had only one question: what must I keep in mind as I go about my job? I sought my editor-in-chief’s advice. A man known to cut to the chase, he said: “We are paying you to make sure we avoid a major crisis. If we do fall into one, then your job is to get us out of it quickly.”

Those sage-like words have stuck with me all this while. As I watch global leaders fumbling in their handling of the stealth killer called Covid-19, his words add a touch of scary realism. And most of the leaders have failed – miserably, let me add – in saving lives and pulling their citizens out of misery. Here was a great opportunity for a country like the United States and a group like the World Health Organisation to step up to the plate and show global leadership. Instead, we saw one deriding China for exporting the virus to the world and the other trying to mollycoddle the Asian powerhouse.

And it’s not just the US, either. Italy, Spain, France and Britain have all displayed an almost callous disregard for the health and safety of not only their citizens but people the world over by arrogantly ignoring the signs of a creeping killer. This is a foreign illness too far away from our shores, they kept insisting, thus stoking xenophobia among their populations.

The US under a president who is only interested in listening to the sound it makes when he blows his own trumpet is the biggest and most dangerous culprit. The crisis in Wuhan became common knowledge on January 7. Yet 15 days later Donald Trump was saying: “We have it totally under control … It is going to be just fine.” As evidence of the speed with which the virus spread in his own country mounted, however, we saw a very different man. About a month after those brave words, he said: “It’s bad. It’s bad.”

His body double across the Atlantic even had the gall to talk about “herd immunity” as a strategy to come to grips with the crisis. It is a novel but alarming tactic because it involves letting people catch the virus, recover and become immune – if that is even possible – showing the British leadership‘s total disregard for the most vulnerable: older people with pre-existing illnesses.