IF he recovers after being tested positive, it is more likely United States President Donald Trump will seek to benefit from a Covid-19 bounce than he would say he had learnt his lesson of not taking seriously the threat of the virus.
You can almost hear it already. I have defeated the "Chinese Virus", which China has set upon America right up to the highest office of state. If I can survive, so can America. Together, we will win.
Thus he will go on in the same vein he did at the US presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio, last Tuesday.
There is no end to Trump unless there is the end of Trump. He is a political thug. Biden looked so frail and small against Trump's verbal assault at last week's so-called presidential debate.
The fact that he is the best the Democrats could put up against the crazed Trump speaks volumes about the state of American politics. It is in a mess. America is a deeply divided country which has been cause and effect of Trump's rise.
If Trump wins the presidential election on Nov 3, everyone expects calamity. If Trump loses, it would also be calamitous. Not really because of the prospect of Trump refusing to leave the White House if he loses, even if there will be a lot of theatre there.
More so because there will be something close to civil war in the US. The divisive politics Trump has used in deeply divided America will outlive him.
For the rest of the world, if Trump survives and wins, and the US becomes even more dysfunctional, American waywardness, impetuosity and animosity will become characteristic in its international relations.
If he loses, America will suffer bitter battles of putting its house in order. In the outside world, the damage done to already declining US leadership by Trump's "America First" policy will not be easily repaired.
It would be the final nail in the coffin of American global leadership. After three quarters of a century, some would say good riddance too. We would be, to borrow from Fareed Zakaria, in a "Post-American World".
To imagine, the book by him with that title was published well over a decade ago in 2008! It takes time to slide even if the last stretch since Trump from 2016 has been steep. Will it be the rise of China, or the rise of the rest, or a world in disarray, the last being what a number of American international relations writers expect post-US leadership?
China no doubt has a leadership role to play, given its size and power absent America, or even with an America playing truant. Unfortunately, China has not shown too much finesse so far. The clumsiness is sometimes put down to the novelty of it all, but could it be that a China-dominant world would be informed by a stridently shrieking and unforgiving, even bullying, regime?
Sharp condemnations and warnings, militarisation of expansively-claimed disputed areas in the South China Sea, altercations with India in the disputed Himalayan border, "wolf diplomacy", the economic sanctions against Australia, and many other expressions of self-righteous anger, are not good signs.
It does not mean that China is wrong in all these situations, but the uncompromising manner in which they have been handled is a cause for concern.
If China is to be a force for good in the world, as it claims, it must learn, and show, to not always want to thump everyone in its way, with the exception of the US, of course, which remains formidable although in decline.
China must not use its economic and technological power only as inducement or punishment and, increasingly, its military power as a warning and threat.
The world will be in disarray if China does not play its card well, as the declining power is well able to point to China's excess, and put bilateral and multilateral obstacles to its rise, like the trade and tech war, but also strategic arrangements like the Quad, comprising the US, Australia, Japan and India.
Indeed the trilateral coalition being forged by Australia, Japan and India, ostensibly to build on the common values among them for the greater good, is founded on fear and suspicion of what China might get up to.
It is China which should be talking to and forging understanding with these middle powers even if they have bilateral military arrangements with America, like Japan and Australia.
They cannot be cast in the "enemy's" pen because of those arrangements, which were in place before China's rise, but they could become anti-China, as Beijing often asserts, if China's attitude towards them is antagonistic.
China, in other words, should learn the art of consensus building, of confidence building and peaceful engagement. It should provide proactive and positive leadership, and bring in all significant members in the international system like the European Union, and make more effective important world bodies like the United Nations and World Trade Organisation.
It is not peaceful engagement if China thinks, for instance, it has Asean in its pocket, because of economic benefit, a dependence which then comes at a cost as China offers crumbs to those among them involved in the South China Sea disputes.
China must not continue to consider itself as the outsider coming in from the cold seeking to extract vengeance for the injustices of the past which, by the way, was not inflicted by most of the countries in the world.
Even in the case of Japan, China should not forget many countries suffered at its hands. And, as noted, those aligned with the US at this point in time were aligned before China came to the fore. They may have been dragged further in by the US as China rose, but this cannot be unexpected of a declining power and those associated with it unsure, and by China's actions sometimes too sure, of what the rising giant might be like.
There is a need to close chapters of the past if we are to look to a global future under new leadership not founded on revanchist tendencies, on imposition and domination.
If we are not to have, in the interregnum, an international system in disarray in the pre-China world. It could be messy.
The writer, a former NST group editor, returns to write on local and international political affairs