Even as countries around the world impose lockdowns in the stepped-up fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States and China find themselves embroiled in a different battle: the blame game. US President Donald Trump has pointedly and repeatedly called Covid-19 a "Chinese virus" - a term that stigmatises that nation, while a senior Chinese Foreign Ministry official promoted conspiracy theories that the virus was brought to China by the US military. Neither, of course, is correct. Health experts have been quick to point out that pandemics have no nationality or ethnicity, and the use of terms which imply that viruses do have ethnic origins can, and indeed have led to discriminatory practices.

But this is also more than a problem of discrimination. The pandemic is now threatening to derail a US-China relationship that was just starting to stabilise. Continued name-calling will hamper global coordination at a time when it is most in need. That the pandemic has become the latest irritant in their bilateral relationship is perhaps not surprising. The politics of the moment plays very much into the nativist, nationalist tendencies that is seeing a resurgence globally. Having watched the pandemic wreak havoc on the economic growth that he tied so closely to his own political fate, Mr Trump senses some advantages in portraying the crisis as a foreign threat. White House officials highlighted criticisms of China's handling of the virus in the outbreak's early days - saying the pandemic could have been avoided if Beijing had done the right thing at the start.