Coronavirus has confirmed that men and women truly are from different planets – at least when it comes to their leaders

If that book about men being from one planet and women from another was right, I believe I’ve discovered a thrilling new psychological condition. Venus Envy, according to a world-renowned Viennese institute I invented some moments ago, is the intense jealousy felt in Covid-stricken countries when citizens compare their male leaders with female leaders elsewhere.

The varying national responses to Covid-19 will occupy public health experts for years. It’s much too early to make grand generalisations about why some countries fared so dramatically worse than others. It may turn out to be pure coincidence that the two countries with the most exemplary reactions are governed by women – and the two engaged in a transatlantic scrap to top the per-capita death league are not. One wouldn’t want to extrapolate from such a bare statistic by calling for an indefinite moratorium on the possessors of gonads holding the highest office. Then again… Look upon the works of Angela Merkel and Jacinda Ardern, ye mighty of 10 Downing Street and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and despair. As Merkel and Ardern start reopening their economies, they bestride the globe like twin colossi of effective crisis management.

New Zealand’s statistics are just astonishing. Even allowing for its remoteness and the relative ease of securing its borders, no one will feel any pressure to mimic Boris Johnson by qualifying its success with “apparent”. Its success is as close to absolute as the circumstances allow. In a nation of about five million, fewer than 1,500 have been infected (the vast majority now recovered) and 19 souls lost. Transposing those numbers to a country of Britain’s population, they equate to total infectivity of about 20,000 and some 260 fatalities.

Here, of course, no one is certain how many have died, because the government finds it convenient to confine the count to hospital mortality. But since it feels conservative to double the official number, to account for those who died in their own and nursing homes, we may assume the virus has killed approaching 50,000.

If “apparent success” is a death rate way more than a hundredfold greater than New Zealand’s, you’d need a powerful psychotropic drug to embrace the thought of apparent failure. That or a skinful of Dr Trump’s Miracle Bleach. The good doctor’s retirement from the briefing podium having proved blessedly brief, he was back in the Rose Garden on Monday to reiterate his lunatic claim that the rest of the planet is looking to the US for help and guidance.

As for Johnson, he degraded an otherwise relatively sensible comeback address with the one wretched snippet of propaganda. If what he sniffs on the wind is sweet success, his sense of smell hasn’t recovered as well as the rest of him.

What has most clearly distinguished Merkel and Ardern from Johnson and Trump is a willingness to listen rather than talk, and the courage to face reality rather than hide from it. While Johnson couldn’t summon the energy for a short stroll to those Cobra meetings, Trump was eschewing doomy intelligence agency predictions in favour of guzzling every last drop of misinformation flowing like toxic effluent from his friends at Fox.

Merkel, a trained scientist, took a close interest in the disease, quickly using contact tracing to identify and eradicate new outbreaks.

Eccentrically flipping the Anglo-American form book, meanwhile, Ardern imposed a draconian lockdown before rather than after the virus had been allowed to run rampant. “Go hard and go early” is how she describes her strategy. If you heard the phrase from Trump, you’d take it for a freshly unearthed passage from the Billy Bush tapes. “Go soft and go late” was the approach on either side of the Atlantic, and the body bags pay testament to that.

Now, while Johnson talks of success and Trump reminds his MAGA elves what a tremendous job he’s done, Ardern and Merkel caution against the complacency they avoided like the plague.

On checking my privilege, I discover that – despite my evident need for a Rigby & Peller trainer bra fitting – I am not a woman. So it’s none of my beeswax to draw inferences about any innate superiority one half of the species enjoys. On rechecking that privilege, it seems that I am a middle-aged man, and possibly more qualified to witter about the arrogance and indolence that characterise my half of humanity.

So when the horror has passed, I advise the entire democratic world to adopt a handicap system which weights all leadership races dramatically in favour of women candidates (though once again, not to generalise from the specific; for every Ardern there may be a Priti Patel, and for each Merkel a dozen Nadine Dorrieses).

Failing that, we might look to Dr Trump’s bespoke coronavirus cure for inspiration. Even if a syringe of Dettol isn’t the smartest treatment for the ailing respiratory system, it would be folly to rule out mandatory oestrogen injections for the infantile, power-hungry male.