Peter Navarro, Mr. Trump’s trade adviser, warned that a pandemic could cost the United States trillions of dollars and put millions of Americans at risk of illness or death. © Doug Mills/The New York Times
New York Times: He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus
WASHINGTON — “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 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 — Dr. 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.
“You guys made fun of me screaming to close the schools,” he wrote to the group, which called itself “Red Dawn,” an inside joke based on the 1984 movie about a band of Americans trying to save the country after a foreign invasion. “Now I’m screaming, close the colleges and universities.”
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WNU Editor: This is a debate that every responsible country is going to have when this is over. I know in the country that I live (Canada), it was slower than the U.S. in responding to this pandemic, and we are paying a dear price for it. Not surprising, some Canadians (including this blogger) are asking questions. The country that I am from, Russia, has been even slower, and they are now in a crisis situation .... Kremlin warns of huge influx of Moscow patients as coronavirus toll climbs (Reuters). As for the U.S., before drawing any conclusions one needs to first look at the measures enacted by the White House and their timeline .... The Real Coronavirus Chronology Shows Trump Was On Top Of It While Biden Was Mocking The Danger (The Federalist). So what is my take? With hindsight, I wish President Trump was quicker in closing the border. But he hesitated after he issued his travel ban on China. Why the hesitation? I am speculating now, but my guess is that he listened to the wrong people, and he ignored his original instincts that closing the border was the right thing to do. So who did he listen to? He listened to the experts at the CDC who were assuring everyone in late January and February that the risk was low. He listened to the World Health Organization's recommendations that closing the border was useless, and that it would not stop the spread of this outbreak .... WHO Director General Praises China's Response To The Wuhan Coronavirus. Blasts The World's Travel And Trade Restrictions On China Ban And Not Sharing Information (February 4, 2020). WHO was also telling everyone that the outbreak was under control .... WHO Says The Wuhan Coronavirus Outbreak Is Not A Pandemic (February 4, 2020). President Trump also had trouble addressing the massive opposition to his China travel ban from the media (New York Times included) and from his political opponents who were using his restrictions to accuse him of xenophobia and racism. It should also be noted that President Trump received little if any support from fellow Republican during this time.
From mid-February to the second week of March more travel restrictions were implemented, as well as the establishment of a task-force lead by Vice-President Pence to address the coronavirus crisis. But if there is a date that I would say changed everything in the U.S., it would be March 11. The World Health Organization, after resisting for weeks the enormous pressure to call the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic, finally relented on March 11. The NBA had their first positive test for a player later in the evening, where the immediate decision was then made (to the shock of everyone) to cancel the season. The next day, on March 12, President Trump imposed travel restrictions on Europe and elsewhere. He was still heavily criticized for that decision. On March 13, President Trump declared a national emergency, and nothing has been the same since. For a person who is accused of not seeing the pandemic, when one looks at what he was actually doing, a different picture emerges. But like I said. When this is all over, the real debate will begin.
WNU Editor: Since January 20th this blog has made over 600 posts on the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak/Covid-19 Pandemic. If anyone wants to go down memory lane, those 600 posts are below. If I say so myself, some of it is fascinating reading.
Pandemic (January, 2020)
Wuhan Coronavirus Outbreak (January 21 - February 13, 2020)
Covid-19 (February 11, 2020 to present)
