Chicago Tribune reprinted NYT study:
They saw it coming: Inside the Trump administration’s failures on coronavirus
By ERIC LIPTON, DAVID E. SANGER, MAGGIE HABERMAN, MICHAEL D. SHEAR, MARK MAZZETTI AND JULIAN E. BARNES
THE NEW YORK TIMES | APR 11, 2020
“Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”
A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Donald Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.
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But dozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:
— The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Trump would avoid such steps until March.
— Despite Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, that outlined out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.
— The health and human services secretary, Alex Azar, directly warned Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Azar was being alarmist.
— Azar publicly announced in February that the government was establishing a “surveillance” system in five American cities to measure the spread of the virus and enable experts to project the next hot spots. It was delayed for weeks. The slow start of that plan, on top of the well-documented failures to develop the nation’s testing capacity, left administration officials with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading. “We were flying the plane with no instruments,” one official said.
— By the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Trump a new approach that would include warning the American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work. But the White House focused instead on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by the president — time when the virus spread largely unimpeded.
Continues w links...
https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw-nyt-trump-early-warnings-ignored-timeline-20200411-dmyrwzmmanhajptjnqlwqfees4-story.html
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