EUROPE is being called the epicentre of the coronavirus, and particularly western Europe, where the responses have varied from the new Socialist-Podemos coalition in Spain nationalising the country’s industry to a total quarantine in France by the neoliberal Emmanuel Macron, criticised for being three weeks too late. 

There is a kind of constant tension between whether xenophobic nationalist solutions to the problem will reign, where the predominant way of fighting the disease that US President Donald Trump labelled a “foreign” virus is to close borders: or whether the European Union will come together to combine its forces to fight this battle. 

There is controversy also about the origins of the virus, with one Chinese official claiming that the virus was manufactured in US army labs and could have been delivered to its first point of outbreak in Wuhan province by the US delegation to the Military World Games, held just weeks before the outbreak.