In The Same Boat

Associating universal maladies with other people is an age-old habit; the fact is, germs don’t carry passports, don’t need visas and are at home in most bodies, almost anywhere

- Kanishk Tharoor

A cliché of public health has it that germs don’t respect borders. The speed with which the novel coronavirus has spread all over the world speaks not just to the infectiousness of the disease, but also to the irrepressible force of human movement. That doesn’t stop some from trying to give the disease a nationality. US President Donald Trump insists on calling coronavirus the “Chinese virus” (as he and his supporters in the media have done repeatedly in the last week), as if tagging it as an adversary could make the disease more knowable — or insulate the president from criticism of his management of the crisis.