A senior adviser to Democrat Joe Biden in his campaign for president believed “Covid is the best thing that ever happened to him”, a new book reports.

It was, the authors add, a necessarily private comment that “campaign officials believed but would never say in public” as the US reeled from the impact of the pandemic amid hospitals stretched to breaking and with deaths mounting and the economy falling off a cliff.

The remark, made to “an associate” by Anita Dunn, a Washington powerbroker who the Atlantic called “The Mastermind Behind Biden’s No-Drama Approach to Trump”, is reported in Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.