On Monday, the World Health Organization bowed to calls from most of its member states to launch an independent probe into how it managed the international response to coronavirus, which has been clouded by finger-pointing between the US and China. The 'comprehensive evaluation' over coronavirus, sought by a coalition of African, European and other countries, is intended to review 'lessons learned' from WHO's coordination of the global response to the virus outbreak.

Donald Trump took the row with China further last night when he threatened to permanently cut off funding for the WHO, which he has accused of bias towards Beijing. More than 100 nations on Sunday pledged their support to the inquiry, including the entire 27-member European Union along with New Zealand, Indonesia, Japan, the UK, India, Canada, Russia, Mexico and Brazil.

Republicans have assailed the bill as a profligate wish list. Even Americans who are suffering from the health and economic ravages of the pandemic may feel a bit stunned by the dollar amount. Does the government really have to spend $5 trillion in three months? Can the United States afford to dump such unfathomable amounts of money into the economy?

The answers to those questions are yes and absolutely yes. Small-business activity has plunged nationwide by nearly 50 percent. Hundreds of thousands of companies have already failed. Big retailers such as J Crew and Neiman Marcus have filed for bankruptcy, while others, including Macy’s, are teetering. By some measures, scarcely one-third of Americans say they are working. Next month’s jobs report will likely show that, for the first time since World War II, a majority of Americans aren’t officially employed.

“The scope and speed of this downturn are without modern precedent,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said on Wednesday. “Additional fiscal support could be costly but worth it if it helps avoid long-term economic damage and leaves us with a stronger recovery.”

"On eight of the past nine days," said the [New York] Times, "there have been fewer deaths announced than there were seven days prior, indicating that the virus toll appears to be easing. More than half of the 24 counties that have recorded the most coronavirus deaths, including Oakland County, Michigan, and Hartford County, Connecticut, are seeing sustained declines." Still, the thrust of the Times article was about the new crisis we will be courting, should we try to resume normal activities too soon. Do that, says the Times, and we could easily forfeit all the progress we have made. Message: Social distancing, sheltering in place, wearing masks, working at home – the practices that broke the back of the pandemic – should be sustained for those able to do so.

Clearly, the opening in many states has been driven by popular protest and public demand. Crowds have ignored social distancing to demonstrate for an end to the shutdown. Protesters have refused to wear masks and engaged in the time-honored practice since the '60s of civil defiance and disobedience. The protesters seem to be saying: We deplore the losses and know the risks, but we cannot live our lives behind closed doors in our homes until the elites tell us, as though we were children, when we may go out in the yard. Hence, the next question we are all likely to confront:

If there is a sudden resurgence of the coronavirus, a second wave, and the media elite and blue-state governors demand a new shutdown, a new closure of beaches, parks, shops, restaurants and churches, will the people of this republic comply with those demands or defy them? Will the nation answer back to the elites: We did that. We sheltered in place. We wore the masks. We socially distanced. We stayed in our homes. We stayed home from work. We have done all we were told to do to contain the virus. But, now, with the shutdown having put 36 million Americans on unemployment and sunk our GDP to Depression-era levels, we're going back to work. The political divide has already begun to appear.

Among those making the case for ending the shutdown and reopening the country and economy will be Trump, red-state governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida and Brian Kemp in Georgia, conservatives in Congress and populists. The proponents of a second shutdown will be liberal governors and mayors, the mainstream media and the Nancy Pelosi wing of Congress.

It should not go unmentioned that the latter's political interests are best served the longer the shutdown endures and the worse the economic situation on November 3. If the economy has failed to begin a robust recovery by fall, the greater the odds that Joe Biden wins the White House.

Unfortunately, other very deep solar minimums throughout history have corresponded with brutally cold temperatures and horrific global famines, and of course this new solar minimum comes at a time when the United Nations is already warning that we are on the verge of “biblical” famines around the world. So we better hope that the sun wakes up soon, because the alternative is almost too horrifying to talk about.

For example, the New York Post is claiming that NASA scientists fear that we could potentially be facing “a repeat of the Dalton Minimum”… which happened between 1790 and 1830 — leading to periods of brutal cold, crop loss, famine and powerful volcanic eruptions. Temperatures plummeted by up to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over 20 years, devastating the world’s food production.

Even worse would be a repeat of the Maunder Minimum which stretched from 1645 to 1715. It came as the globe was already in the midst of “the Little Ice Age”, and it caused harvest failures and famines all over the globe…

“From a psychological perspective, I am not sure that it works at all,” said Rory Sutherland, a behavioral scientist and vice chairman of the advertising agency Ogilvy. “Any group assembling could simply claim that everyone present was part of the same cluster, and without spectacular levels of bureaucracy, it would be impossible to establish the veracity of this. It would re-establish the sight of large groups of people as a norm.”

“I think it falls into that category of “excellent science, bad policy,” he added. It’s easy to envisage a not too distant dystopia of state-enforced social distancing where the mandatory app will deduct points from your social credit score if you venture outside of your house once too often or meet with an unauthorized friend.

Yet tomorrow Taiwan will almost certainly be barred by the WHO from joining its influential annual assembly of global health experts, which will largely focus on coronavirus over two days of online meetings. Taiwan is shunned by global bodies because China refuses to recognise the legitimacy of a neighbouring nation that its dictatorial Communist Party chiefs openly admit they want to grab.

'We want to share with other countries what we 26 have learned in dealing with coronavirus,' said David Lin, Taiwan's ambassador to Britain and a former foreign minister. 'We tried to warn WHO about human-to-human transmission. If all countries had taken early action, this pandemic might now be different.'

Britain has joined 12 other nations including Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and the United States in demanding a vote to reinstate Taiwan's observer status at the WHO's assembly. 'They have got something to teach the rest of the world – every country, including China, must surely want to know the secret of their success,' said Winston Peters, New Zealand's Deputy Prime Minister.

'It's just logic.' British support is more muted. But Foreign Office Minister Lord Ahmad has said the UK backs Taiwan's participation in bodies such as WHO 'where statehood is not a prerequisite and it can contribute to the global good'. Taiwan is likely to fall victim to China's aggressive 'Wolf Warrior' diplomacy, which uses its growing economic clout to force global bodies, other countries and businesses to accept its worldview.

While the virus rattles the globe, causing economic hardship for millions and killing more than 80,000 Americans, the findings of the poll by the University of Chicago Divinity School and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research indicate that people may also be searching for deeper meaning in the devastating outbreak.

Even some who don’t affiliate with organized religion, such as Lance Dejesus of Dallastown, Pennsylvania, saw a possible bigger message in the virus. Marcia Howl, 73, a Methodist and granddaughter of a minister, said she feels God’s protection but not certainty that it would save her from the virus. “I believe he has protected me in the past, that he has a plan for us,” said Howl, of Portalas, New Mexico. “I don’t know what’s in his plan, but I believe his presence is here looking after me. Whether I can survive it or not, that’s a different story.”

“Residents want the island to open up not just to contain economic losses but also because tourism is our life,” Koukas said. “For sure, this season won’t be normal, but we want to open because it will be very important for the following ones.”

After a two-month battle to contain the virus, European governments have begun slowly easing curbs on public life, providing hope to hoteliers, restaurateurs and bar owners. It’s a delicate balancing act for officials keen to revive activity but wary of a resurgence of the disease.

Companies from British Airways owner IAG SA to Germany’s TUI AG, the world’s biggest package-holiday operator, are eliminating tens of thousands of jobs and some smaller, family-owned businesses may never recover. “It is only a matter of time until money runs out and we will see bankruptcies all around Europe,” said ETC Executive Director Eduardo Santander.

In June 1971, a White Paper was sent to every home in the UK, promising: "There is no question of Britain losing essential sovereignty." Then, in a TV broadcast in January 1973 to mark his signing of the Treaty of Rome, Mr Heath went even further.

He said: “There are some in this country who fear that, in going into Europe, we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty.These fears, I need hardly say, are completely unjustified.”

However, Mr Heath’s assertion is largely at odds with what he verifiably already knew about the EEC and its true plans. In a report for the Brexit think tank 'Red Cell' titled 'Putting The Fisheries Negotiations Into Context', former Conservative Party minister Patrick Nicholls revealed in a letter in 1961, Lord Chancellor, Lord Kilmuir, had specifically warned Mr Heath he had mislead the country when he had said that accession to the Treaty of Rome had no constitutional implications. Mr Heath, though, did nothing to address such warning.