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.

Both America and Europe are trying to prop up their small businesses, repeatedly handing out piles of cash.

We ask why they're going about it in different ways, why success is elusive on both sides of the Atlantic, and whether any of it will be enough.

And listen to this. Ad hoc radio stations are popping up all over the world.

Some are providing crucial public health information

or doing call-ins with locked-down listeners.

We tune in and find that mostly it's about a sense of shared experience.

But first, the origin of the novel coronavirus, where and how it actually first infected a human has become more than a scientific question.

Yesterday, President Donald Trump claimed he had seen evidence that the virus came from a laboratory in China.

We're looking at exactly where it came from, who it came from, how it happened separately and also scientifically.

So we're going to be able to find that.

And my question is, have you seen anything at this point that gives you a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of

virology was the origin of this virus?

Yes, I have.

That's not what Mr. Trump's own intelligence services have suggested.

They say they've seen no evidence of genetic engineering.

And that's what scientists are saying so far too, but the story is nowhere near complete. Before the initial

outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the trail goes cold. There's much more than a blame

game at stake here. Finding out exactly how this latest coronavirus made the leap into humans is vital

in putting a stop to future outbreaks. Over the last 20 years, humans have been hit three times by coronaviruses that cause fatalities.

Natasha Loder is our health policy editor.

The first signs of trouble were in 2002 when SARS entered the human population.

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