Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio.

I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Today marks 40 years since the end of a massacre that many believe put South Korea firmly on a path to democracy.

The slaughter and unrest in the city of Guangzhou was for decades an altogether taboo subject.

And even today it's a divisive one.

And if all goes to plan, a crude rocket will take off today from American soil for the first time in nearly nine years.

It's a point of pride for NASA which had been relying on Russia for a lift, but also for SpaceX, the first private firm to put people in space.

First up though.

Exactly where it started still isn't known, but the first reported death from COVID-19 on American soil came on February 29th in Seattle and early focus of the epidemic.

42 days later the epicenter had become New York, which was reporting 10,000 cases and nearly 1,000 deaths every day.

America had become the worst affected country in absolute terms.

By the end of this week it's expected that a hundred thousand would have died.

In times of crisis Americans usually look to their president, but Mr. Trump has been far from a unifying figure.

President Trump has certainly given his critics lots of ammunition to criticize him.

Idris Kallun is our US policy correspondent.

Many of them believe that he bears responsibility for a significant fraction of America's now a hundred thousand or approaching a hundred thousand deaths due to coronavirus.

We have it very much under control in this country.

At the beginning he was keen to downplay the severity of the threat.

At the aspect of our society should be prepared.

I don't think it's going to come to that, especially with the fact that we're going down, not up, we're going for a instance.

We're going to suggest that by closing borders with China and by Europe that America could somehow avoid the threat altogether.

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