Three weeks ago there was much talk of a Chernobyl moment for China’s Communist Party, discredited by totalitarian attempts to suppress news of the spreading coronavirus in Wuhan.

But fast-moving events can play wicked tricks, especially on a White House allergic to scientific facts. COVID-19 is more likely to be the Chernobyl moment for Donald Trump.

His systematic destruction of US pandemic defences - policy vandalism of the first order - and his surreal efforts to conjure away the virus with denialist spin suddenly brings an unthinkable prospect into play.

The coming backlash may sweep Bernie Sanders into power on a socialist manifesto of Piketty wealth taxes, the partial closure of the US oil and gas industry, and vast increases in the size and role of the US government, all with an implicit budget deficit of $3 trillion. Try feeding that into your models for GDP growth, equity prices, or bond yields.

The Trump administration has cut funding for the US Center for Disease Control by 9pc. This month he proposed slashing it a further 16pc. The worst hit area has been pandemic preparation. The CDC’s global health security initiative has been chopped by 80pc, reducing country coverage from 49 to 10.

Mr Trump got rid of the US Complex Crises Fund. He shut down the pandemic and global health machinery at the White House, and fired the lot. He tried to cut the budget of the National Institutes of Health - the world’s finest concentration of science - by 20pc in 2018, and by 27pc in 2019. Congress stopped the worst but damage has been done.