I’m sure when this disaster is over, mainstream economics and the authorities will claim that it was an exogenous crisis nothing to do with any inherent flaws in the capitalist mode of production and the social structure of society. It was the virus that did it. This was the argument of the mainstream after the Great Recession of 2008-9 and it will be repeated in 2020.

Iran’s determination to hit back despite the pandemic contradicts the Trump administration view that killing Qassim Suleimani was a deterrent.

"Avner Pinchuk, a privacy expert with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, said such capabilities could include real-time tracking of infected persons’ mobile phones to spot quarantine breaches and backtracking through meta-data to figure out where they had been and who they had contacted."

The moves are the most far-reaching and disruptive the city has taken to slow the spread of the coronavirus.