WE are at the stage where the covid-19 pandemic is being replaced by politics that are just as deadly at the virus itself.

We have Matt Hancock posting out tens of thousands of DIY test kits to achieve his long-promised 100,000 total.

I am displaying my new poster:

Tory voters: in the next election stay at home. Support the NHS. Save lives.

I hope it will remind people that, despite the Tories’ newfound love of the National Health Service, for the last 10 years they, with some early help from the Liberal Democrats in coalition, have been promoting austerity and ruthlessly cutting the very NHS they are so busy praising today.

What they weren’t cutting they were selling off in their non-stop attempt to privatise the whole shooting match.

President Donald Trump’s ambassador to Britain is Woody Johnson of the well-known health-product supplier Johnson & Johnson — and chief US candidate to buy some of the more lucrative parts of the NHS.

Prime Minister Johnson, having actually seen just what the NHS can do, is playing the war-injured hero and practising his Churchill imitation.

Pathetically he more resembles the insurance dog rather than the VE Day leader.

Trump is trying to make the best of the fact that the United States has by far the world’s largest number of confirmed coronavirus cases, with more than 1.2 million infections and over 74,000 deaths.

Trump is flailing about trying to blame it all on the Chinese.

In one short news statement he managed to use the phrase “it came from China” fifteen times.

His White House team are calling the coronavirus “Kung Flu” and we all know that Trump uses his felt tip to alter any mention of “coronavirus” to “Chinese virus” in any scripts he is given to read.

Much worse is the fact that warmonger Trump has started to talk about the consequences China might face from the US. Trump has declared that China should face consequences if it was “knowingly responsible” for the coronavirus pandemic.

“It could have been stopped in China before it started and it wasn’t, and the whole world is suffering because of it,” Trump told a daily White House briefing.

“If they were knowingly responsible, yeah, I mean, then sure there should be consequences.”

Perhaps fortunately, he did not elaborate on what actions the United States might take.

We do know that he has already stopped the US contribution to the World Health Organisation, accusing it of being “China-centric.” At home Trump is now seeking to use Beijing to help deflect from his own shortcomings and stoke up anti-China sentiment among voters to start his re-election bid.

At the same time, however, the US is heavily reliant on China for medical personal protection equipment (PPE) desperately needed by American hospital workers — and Trump also wants to preserve a hard-won and mutually beneficial US-China trade deal, including a multi-billion agricultural agreement.

His media mates at Fox News have reported that a Wuhan virology laboratory had likely developed the coronavirus as part of China’s effort to demonstrate its capacity to identify and combat viruses.

Trump himself says he has actually seen evidence to prove that the coronavirus originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“We’re going to see where it comes from,” Trump said. “We have people looking at it very, very strongly. Scientific people, intelligence people, and others.”

Pressed to explain what evidence he had seen that the virus originated in a Chinese lab, Trump responded, “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.”

Before Trump made his allegations, his own Director of National Intelligence said that the whole US-intelligence community “concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the Covid-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.”

Trump’s comments came as global infections passed 3.8 million – nearly a third of them in the US.

The US president is increasingly making Beijing’s part in handling the outbreak a major issue for his November re-election campaign.

The president and his allies have repeatedly touted the theory — for which there is no evidence — that an infectious disease lab in Wuhan, the centre of the Chinese outbreak, was the source of the global pandemic.

That is not to say that the Chinese did everything right. Dr Li Wenliang, a doctor working in a Wuhan hospital sent a message to fellow medics when he spotted seven cases of a previously unknown virus at the end of December.

Three days later local police paid him a visit and told him to stop spreading frightening rumours.

Dr Li thought the virus looked like Sars — the virus that led to a global epidemic in 2003. His cases had come from the Huanan Seafood market in Wuhan and the patients were in quarantine in his hospital.

What Dr Li didn’t know then was that the disease that had been discovered was an entirely new coronavirus.

He was summoned to the Public Security Bureau where he was told to sign a letter saying he had made false comments that had severely disturbed the social order.

Later those local authorities apologised to him but by then much time had been wasted. It was not until 20 January that China declared the outbreak an emergency. Sadly Dr Li himself became a fatal victim of the coronavirus.

The WHO, much to Trump’s chagrin and despite his attempt to blackmail them by cutting their funding, are sticking to their view that this is not a man-made virus.

Scientists worldwide generally agree with the WHO that the virus is hosted by several species of bats in Southern China. The bats themselves cannot pass the disease on to humans.

For that to take place the bat must pass the virus to an intermediate animal probably, like the bat, a mammal. Contact with that animal, alive or dead, can see the human infected. Other similar bat populations pass other closely related viruses to birds hence Avian Flu.

One of the main reasons the pandemic became so all embracing is the amount of international travel every nation — including the Chinese — takes for granted today.

Like every other nation the Chinese have taken it for granted that we can hop on a plane and jet off to anywhere across the globe. Cruise ships too, with passengers from every nation, became hotbeds for the coronavirus to breed.

Mass sporting and entertainment events brought huge crowds together who would then journey back to their homelands taking the virus with them.

For instance, 68,500 horse-racing fans, many of them from Ireland, attended the Cheltenham Gold Cup on March 13. The coronavirus travelled back with them to take the disease not just to the Emerald Isle but worldwide.

However, Trump is still more concerned with winning the next election than he is with the health of the US population. If that means threatening China with something like a war I’m sure he won’t hesitate.

If you think I’m being alarmist come back with me to 1982. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, for whom Trump has enormous respect, was losing popularity and support.

Thatcher’s first four years as Prime Minister had seen unemployment rocket and the economy in deep recession. She had no chance in any future election.

Then she declared war on Argentina for their scrap dealers landing on a deserted and ruined whaling station on South Georgia.

Thatcher became a hero of the Falklands War and in June 1983 the Tories won a decisive election victory — earning the Conservatives their biggest parliamentary majority of the post-war era.

I just hope President Trump isn’t reading this article.