From lockdown to standoff: global tensions fare as Australia and other nations climb down coronavirus mountain

Trust lost in global virus blame game

President Trump continues to berate China and criticise others while saying his administration has done well in combating coronavirus, despite America now having a third of the world's confirmed cases, and almost a third of the deaths.

WITH health experts increasingly confident Australia has this first - and hopefully only - wave of coronavirus infections under control, state and territory governments are starting to cautiously unwind a handful of mandatory restrictions, with NSW easing its limits on social visits.

At the same time, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has foreshadowed a relaxing of some federal disease-control measures, although he has tied this "early mark" to a greater take-up of the COVIDsafe tracking app, presently used by 3.5 million people from a population of 25 million.

Globally, coronavirus has hit 187 of the world's 195 sovereign nations, and more than half the world's population is under some form of lockdown, meaning Australia is just one of many nations looking to limit the already massive cost of controlling the virus by easing restrictions.

CORONAVIRUS CROSS-SECTION

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In the United States, where distrust of government extends all the way to President Donald Trump, armed protesters entered the Michigan statehouse on Thursday in the latest of a series of anti-lockdown demonstrations.

This despite America adding between 20,000 and 35,000 cases a day to its coronavirus total during April.

The US now accounts for more than 1 million of the world's 3.2 million confirmed cases, and 63,000 deaths from a global total of 233,000.

Despite these alarming statistics, President Trump continues to boast of his government's response to the pandemic.

Unless coronavirus intervenes, the US presidential election is due on November 3, and President Trump has increasingly stoked the flames of international tension in recent days, repeatedly hinting at "evidence" COVID-19 emerged from the bio-laboratory in Wuhan that has been the centre of fringe beliefs about the virus since the outbreak was identified in that city late last year.

Australia's support for an independent, international inquiry into the origins of COVID-19 is understandable, but it is also easy to see why China distrusts such calls as beholden to an increasingly angry USA.

Trade might be the glue that binds relations between the democratic West and an autocratic China, but the blame game we warned about a fortnight ago is turning trust into a rare commodity.

We are already fighting one invisible enemy. The battle will become all the harder if international cooperation is punctured by preening political egos.

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President Donald Trump with Chinese President Xi Jinping during the G-20 summit in Japan last June.

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