The number of US servicemen and women killed in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan - over an aggregate 44 years of fighting is almost exactly the same as the number of Americans who've now lost their lives to coronavirus in just three months of America's war against the hidden enemy, as Donald Trump likes to refer to Covid-19.

One of Donald Trump's first acts when he moved into the Oval Office in 2017, was to restore to a central position the bust of Winston Churchill that Barack Obama had moved out in favour of a bronze of Martin Luther King Jr.

And in this fight against coronavirus, Donald Trump does see himself as a war leader; the property tycoon who could work a shovel on a Manhattan building site was also going to be shown to be a man of destiny - the untried field-marshal, with a baton in his knapsack ready to command the troops to get the job done.

The initial period of the US effort against the virus was marked by one significant action in late January, when the president stopped non-American visitors from China entering the United States.

That was smart and decisive (although some have argued, to my mind unfairly, that Trump should have stopped anyone and everyone coming from China).

All while he was on a determined mission to tell America that this thing from China was no biggie, and certainly was not going to upend the economy - the centrepiece of his strategy for re-election in November.

It is worth just going through the president's quotes from these critical few weeks.

Feb 2: "We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.".

China, I spoke with President Xi, and they're working very, very hard.

Feb 24: "The coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.

Because of a lack of testing, there had been extensive community transmission - people were coming down with coronavirus, but it wasn't clear where they'd contracted it, who they'd caught it from, how they'd got it.

The "track and trace" (the language of coronavirus that we've all now become so familiar with) was now impossible.

If the city was quickly to become the most worrying centre of the outbreak, the borough of Queens became the epicentre of the epicentre - the district where Donald Trump had grown up.

If Queens is where Donald Trump grew up, Manhattan is where he made his money - and nothing says money like Wall Street - this is the pulse oxygen monitor of the US economy.

But as it became clear that the US economy was going to have to shut down, so the Dow Jones index went diving downwards - vertiginous drops, causing circuit-breakers to kick in, and causing the president and his advisors to fret that his whole re-election strategy had gone up in flames.

And he also gave praise to Donald Trump where he thought it was due; he tweaked the tail of the administration when he thought it needed a bit of a kicking.

At around the same time as Cuomo was capturing the nation's attention, Donald Trump decided he would go daily with a White House briefing too.

It is hard to overstate how much Donald Trump loves - and needs - the roar of the crowd.

The vice president, Mike Pence, had been given the task of heading the coronavirus taskforce.

He never forgot to praise the president to the hilt, saluting him for his leadership.

That is something that came easily to Pence and is something Donald Trump hardly ever does.

Though there would be a revolving cast of characters in the briefing room - the two other stalwarts were Dr Anthony Fauci, the independent minded head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr Deborah Birx, who used to head the fight against AIDS for the Obama administration,and was made the coronavirus response coordinator.

No sooner had the US economy gone into shutdown than other, more business minded, voices were in Donald Trump's other ear telling him that the remedy his doctors were prescribing was worse than the disease.

When asked about this Fauci gave an object lesson in disagreeing with the president without disagreeing: "You don't set the timeline, the virus does," he told reporters.

The jobless totals were soaring, and Donald Trump saw his 'strong economy' election strategy disappearing down the plug-hole.

If you'd grown up in an impoverished background you were more likely to have the pre-existing conditions - the co-morbidities, as they say in the US - that would prove so deadly with coronavirus: hypertension, diabetes, obesity, heart disease.

His staff had produced a lengthy campaign style video detailing how brilliantly he'd handled the outbreak - for the first 45 minutes of this over two-hour long news conference, Donald Trump spoke about himself.

I was also at the briefing where the president spoke about injecting disinfectant to treat coronavirus.

But as the criticism piled up against the president, so Donald Trump bristled.

The first was China.

Despite his early praise for President Xi, China was now in Donald Trump's cross-hairs?

China had lied and covered up.

Worse still in Donald Trump's eyes, China had intimidated the World Health Organisation, and its weak, pusillanimous leadership had allowed itself to be cowed by Beijing, and therefore had failed to warn the world sufficiently of the dangers that this new strain of virus presented.

In this, sure, there was blame shifting - but President Trump had a point - both about shortcomings of the WHO, and the candour of the Chinese leadership?

But as nothing compared to the president shifting firmly in favour of reopening the US economy?

A public health emergency, with a virus that is no respecter of whether you are a Democrat or Republican, Trump lover or Trump hater had divided and bitterly polarised the country.

You can be sure that the anti-vaxx brigade (and remember Donald Trump was once one of its advocates) will be out in force, stirring up doubts about the science, the medicine, the state, big brother, you name it

Donald Trump has boasted repeatedly in the past couple of months that no country has done more coronavirus testing that then USA