At one point United States president Donald Trump called Covid-19 “a hoax” and said that “there is no pandemic and it’s just a flu”. As he has now discovered “the hoax” was capable of putting him in hospital. Trump, his wife Melania, and at least 27 people around him have contracted the virus. With the election in just three weeks, his quick return to the White House, and the consistent downplaying of the virus has outraged health experts and those who have had or have lost relatives to Covid-19. Whether he likes it or not the pandemic stubbornly remains in the forefront of next month’s election. Back in the 2016 Presidential election there were widespread allegations of Russian interference. In August, after a three-year long bipartisan investigation, the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee released a nearly 1,000-page report on Russian interference that found it had posed a “grave counterintelligence threat”. On Tuesday, White House national security adviser Robert O Brien told his Russian counterpart, Nikolai Patrushev to “stay out” of the November election. And there’ve been similar concerns raised about Russian interference in the UK’s Brexit polling and its influence in Belarus. With us to discuss this is Stefan Auer, Associate Professor of European Studies at the University of Hong Kong.

This week another bump in Covid-19 cases in Hong Kong after a long holiday weekend and the easing of social distancing measures had health experts predicting another resurgence in the virus. The pandemic has restricted travel and limited personal contact between friends and families. As person to person fades there is Increasingly interaction through online platforms. “The Pulse” is also using this method to introduce an occasional mini-series, “Long Time No Chat”, in which we invite a local person to call friends overseas to talk about what’s going on in their countries. Today, the topic is Belarus.