IT TOOK 70 DAYS TO TREAT COVID-19 AS A LETHAL FORCE IN U.S.

The president was made aware of the coronavirus in his daily reports starting January 3^rd, 2020.

By the time Donald Trump falsely proclaimed himself a “wartime president”, and that the coronavirus was the invisible enemy, the United States was already on course to see more of its people die than in the wars of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

The country has adopted a new list of wartime measures that have never been employed in US history.  They include the banning of incoming travelers from two continents, the bringing of US commerce enlisting nearly-halt of US industry to make emergency medical gear, and the confining of 230 million Americans to their homes.  All of this in a desperate bid to survive an attack by an unseen lethal force

Despite these and other extreme steps, the United States will go down as the country that was best prepared to fight a pandemic.  But due to our leadership, the nation ended up totally over-matched by the coronavirus, and sustaining heavier casualties than any other nation.

This did not have to happen. Though not perfectly prepared, the United States had more expertise, more resources, better plans and epidemiological experience than dozens of countries that fared far better in fending off this virus.

The failures have echoes of the period leading up to the 9/11 attacks.  Warnings had been sounded, including at the highest levels of government, but the president was totally deaf to them until the enemy struck.  

The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak of the coronavirus in China on Jan. 3.  Within days, US spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of the threat to Trump by including a warning about the coronavirus in the President’s Daily Brief.  It was the first of many daily warnings that the president called “a hoax”.

Yes, it took 70 days from that initial notification for Trump to treat the coronavirus, not as a distant threat or a flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had over-come America’s defenses.  A threat that was going to kill tens of thousands of citizens world-wide. That, more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was totally squandered by our president and his administration.

As history will show, 33 times President Trump downplayed the coronavirus publicly.

Trump’s baseless assertions in those weeks, including his claim that it would all just “miraculously go away”.  He also made what was a significant public confusion and he contradicted the urgent messages of public health experts.  “While the media would rather speculate about outrageous claims of palace intrigue, President Trump and the Trump administration remain completely focused on the health and safety of the American people with around the clock work to slow the spread of the virus, expand testing, and expedite vaccine development," said Judd Deere, a spokesman for the president. "Because of the President’s leadership we will emerge from this challenge healthy, stronger, and with a prosperous and growing economy.”

Yeah, right.

The president’s behavior and combative statements were only the visible layer of much deeper levels of presidential dysfunction.

The worst failure was a breakdown in efforts to develop a diagnostic test that could be mass produced and distributed across the United States.  This would enabling our agencies to map early outbreaks of the virus, and to impose quarantine measures.  At one point, a Food and Drug Administration official tore into lab officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  They told them that their lapses in protocol, including concerns that the lab did not meet the criteria for sterile conditions, were so serious that the FDA would be “shut down,” if the CDC were a commercial, rather than a government, entity.

That’s what went wrong with coronavirus testing in the US according to, The Posts’ Fact Checker.

Other failures continued to run through the system. The administration was often weeks behind the curve in reacting to the virus spreading, closing those doors that were already contaminated. There were on-going arguments between the White House and public health agencies over funding, combined with a meager existing stockpile of emergency supplies.  The administration left vast stretches of the country’s health-care system without protective gear until the outbreak became a world pandemic. Infighting, turf wars and a number of leadership changes hobbled the work of the so called, Coronavirus Task Force.

It may never be known how many thousands of deaths, or millions of infections, might have been prevented with a response that was more comprehensive, urgent and effective.  But even now, there are many issues that the administration’s handling of the crisis has had potentially devastating consequences.

Even the president’s base has finally begun to confront this reality.  In mid-March, as Trump was rebranding himself as a wartime president and finally urging the public to help slow the spread of the virus, Republican leaders were poring over grim polling data.  The data suggested that Trump was lulling his followers into a false sense of security in the face of a lethal threat.

The latest poll showed that far more Republicans than Democrats were being influenced by Trump’s dismissive descriptions of the virus and the scornful coverage on Fox News and other conservative networks.  As a result, Republicans were in distressingly large numbers refusing to change their travel plans, or follow “social distancing” guidelines, and stock up on supplies, or take the coronavirus threat seriously.

“Denial is not likely to be a successful strategy for survival,” GOP pollster Neil Newhouse stated in a document that was shared with GOP leaders on Capitol Hill.  It was also discussed widely at the White House. Trump’s most ardent supporters, it said, were “putting themselves and their loved ones in danger.”

In recent days, Trump has had to deal with reminders that he had once claimed the caseload would soon be “down to zero.”

More than 7,000 people have now died of the coronavirus, and that's just in the United States so far.  But Trump has acknowledged that new models suggest that the eventual national death toll could be between 100,000 and 240,000.  However, he doesn’t state just how those numbers were determined.

Beyond the suffering that is in store for thousands of victims and their families, the outcome has altered the international reputation and standing of the United States.  It has damaged and diminished its reputation as a global leader in times of an extraordinary lethal virus .

“This has been a real blow to the sense that America is a competent nation.” said Gregory Treverton, a former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the government’s senior provider of intelligence analysis.  He stepped down from the NIC in January 2017 and now teaches at the University of Southern California. “That was an important part of our global role. Traditional friends and allies have looked to us because they thought we could be competently called upon to work with them in a crisis. This administration has done the opposite of that.”

To prove the truth of this article, which retraces the failures over the first 70 days of the coronavirus crisis, it is based on 47 interviews with administration officials, public health experts, intelligence officers and others involved in fighting the pandemic. 

As usual with this administration, many of those interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and decisions because they weren’t given the authority to discuss with the media and the Washington Post.

Copyright G. Ater 2020