If the Covid-19 pandemic is a global crisis, doesn’t a world-wide health emergency make national interest obsolete? If the world is “all in it together” surely nothing can be the same again? Like it or not, great powers are doing what they have always done, jockeying for position once the dust settles.

Above all, China and the United States are looking past the lockdowns. The growing blame game over who is responsible for Covid-19’s dramatic spread is becoming viral in its own right.

European countries like Britain are beset with parochial finger-pointing, but the superpowers have been accusing each other. Beijing is well aware that its officials mishandled the emergence of the virus by trying to silence its medical Cassandras at the end of 2019. This has made it politically essential to divert popular anger over the human and economic costs hitting their vast population onto Beijing’s rivals.

Bad economic fallout for China looks inevitable today. Western societies have woken up to their dependence on Chinese production of essential items. We forgot Adam Smith’s warning that there are “more important things than opulence”. Routine naval standoffs in the South China Sea between the US Navy and China show the virus has not stopped geopolitics.

Will it cure Westerners of their chronic short-termism which outsourced everything from virus tests to paracetamol to China? Lenin was wrong to say that the Western capitalists would sell him the rope for their own noose, but China’s Market-Leninists saw that the West would sell its economic foundations provided we made a quick buck.