Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Timeline of the Coronavirus Pandemic and the U.S. Response to It



NOVEMBER 2005

In 2005, President George W. Bush was reading a book. The book was John Barry's history of the 1918 influenza. The book spurred Bush to start poking around to see if the country was ready to handle another pandemic.

In a November 2005 speech at the National Institutes of Health, Bush laid out proposals in granular detail -- describing with stunning prescience how a pandemic in the United States would unfold. Among those in the audience was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leader of the current crisis response, who was then and still is now the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
"A pandemic is a lot like a forest fire," Bush said at the time. "If caught early it might be extinguished with limited damage. If allowed to smolder, undetected, it can grow to an inferno that can spread quickly beyond our ability to control it." . . .

"To respond to a pandemic, we need medical personnel and adequate supplies of equipment," Bush said. "In a pandemic, everything from syringes to hospital beds, respirators masks and protective equipment would be in short supply."

Bush told the gathered scientists that they would need to develop a vaccine in record time.

"If a pandemic strikes, our country must have a surge capacity in place that will allow us to bring a new vaccine on line quickly and manufacture enough to immunize every American against the pandemic strain," he said.

That was the Bush administration. And please keep in mind that all of this energy came directly from President Bush himself, who saw the dangers when others did not, who raised the alarm all on his own, and who then rode herd over the army of officials and bureaucrats in the executive branch.

The Obama administration created an actual playbook for dealing with a pandemic—the 69 page document is literally called a "playbook"—which they handed off to the Trump administration in 2017.

DECEMBER 2015

The Obama administration and medical firm Halyard Health of Alpharetta, Ga., announced the project to develop a rapid pandemic mask production line.

DURING 2016 (specific date not determined)

The Obama Administration prepares a playbook for dealing with a pandemic. Among its strategies: “Is there sufficient personal protective equipment for healthcare workers who are providing medical care?” the playbook instructs its readers, as one early decision that officials should address when facing a potential pandemic. “If YES: What are the triggers to signal exhaustion of supplies? Are additional supplies available? If NO: Should the Strategic National Stockpile release PPE to states?”

The strategies are among hundreds of tactics and key policy decisions laid out in a 69-page National Security Council playbook on fighting pandemics, which POLITICO is detailing for the first time. Other recommendations include that the government move swiftly to fully detect potential outbreaks, secure supplemental funding and consider invoking the Defense Production Act — all steps in which the Trump administration lagged behind the timeline laid out in the playbook.

“Each section of this playbook includes specific questions that should be asked and decisions that should be made at multiple levels” within the national security apparatus, the playbook urges, repeatedly advising officials to question the numbers on viral spread, ensure appropriate diagnostic capacity and check on the U.S. stockpile of emergency resources.

The Trump Administration ignores the playbook.

[More information and a link to the actual playbook can be found here: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/25/trump-coronavirus-national-security-council-149285]

JANUARY 11, 2017

Anthony S. Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said there is “no doubt” Donald J. Trump will be confronted with a surprise infectious disease outbreak during his presidency.

Fauci has led the NIAID for more than 3 decades, advising the past five United States presidents on global health threats from the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s through to the current Zika virus outbreak.

During a forum on pandemic preparedness at Georgetown University, Fauci said the Trump administration will not only be challenged by ongoing global health threats such as influenza and HIV, but also a surprise disease outbreak.

“The history of the last 32 years that I have been the director of the NIAID will tell the next administration that there is no doubt they will be faced with the challenges their predecessors were faced with,” he said.

JANUARY 13, 2017

The Obama administration’s transition team conducted tabletop disaster response activities with Trump's top aides. One of those tests was eerily prescient—a strain of novel and deadly influenza they called H9N2, origination in Asia and quickly spreading to Europe and then to the U.S. "Health officials warn that this could become the worst influenza pandemic since 1918," the Obama team told Trump's aides in the exercise, according to the documents and interviews from that transition effort obtained by Politico.

Those materials show that the "Trump team was told it could face specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national response was 'paramount.'”

DURING 2017 (specific date not determined)

The Department of Homeland Security stopped updating its annual models of the havoc that pandemics would wreak on America’s critical infrastructure in 2017, according to current and former DHS officials with direct knowledge of the matter.

From at least 2005 to 2017, an office inside DHS, in tandem with analysts and supercomputers at several national laboratories, produced detailed analyses of what would happen to everything from transportation systems to hospitals if a pandemic hit the United States.

But the work abruptly stopped in 2017 amid a bureaucratic dispute over its value, two of the former officials said, leaving the department flat-footed as it seeks to stay ahead of the impact the COVID-19 outbreak is having on vast swaths of the U.S. economy. Officials at other agencies have requested some of the reports from the pandemic modeling unit at DHS in recent days, only to find the information they needed scattered or hard to find quickly.

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

The Washington Post writes “CDC to cut by 80 percent efforts to prevent global disease outbreak.” The meat of the story is “Countries where the CDC is planning to scale back include some of the world’s hot spots for emerging infectious disease, such as China, Pakistan, Haiti, Rwanda and Congo.”

FEBRUARY 13, 2018

The US Intelligence Community released its annual intelligence assessment identifying coronaviruses as “having pandemic potential if they were to acquire efficient human-to-human transmissibility.”

MAY 2018

At the urging of John Bolton,  the White House dismantled the National Security Council’s global health security office. Trump bristled when asked about his decision to disband the office at a news conference in the Rose Garden [in March 2020].

“I just think it's a nasty question,” the president responded. “And when you say ‘me,' I didn't do it. ... I don't know anything about it.”

[G]lobal health experts say Bolton's decision left the Trump administration flat-footed in confronting the virus that has caused nearly 6,400 cases of COVID-19 and killed 108 in the U.S. as of March 18.
"Bolton’s chosen approach to NSC 'streamlining' involved decapitating and diluting the White House’s focus on pandemic threats," Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, wrote…"He eliminated the senior director position entirely, closed the biodefense directorate, and spread the remaining staff across other parts of the NSC."

Closing the pandemic office "clearly reflected the White House’s misplaced priorities and has proven to be a gross misjudgment," Konyndyk wrote.

  • At an event marking the 100 year anniversary of the 1918 pandemic, Borio says “pandemic flu” is the “number 1 health security issue” and that the U.S. is not ready to respond.
  • One day later her boss, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer is pushed out of the administration and the global health security team is disbanded.
  • Rep. Ami Bera warns that “Admiral Ziemer’s departure is deeply alarming, especially when the administration is actively working to cut funds that addressed past pandemics like Ebola.”
  • Beth Cameron, former senior director for global health security on the National Security Council adds: “It is unclear in his absence who at the White House would be in charge of a pandemic,” Cameron said, calling it “a situation that should be immediately rectified.”
    • Note: It was not.
In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency. The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton pressured Ziemer’s DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10. Meanwhile, throughout 2018, the U.S. Agency for International Development and its director, Mark Green, came repeatedly under fire from both the White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And though Congress has so far managed to block Trump administration plans to cut the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by 40 percent, the disease-fighting cadres have steadily eroded as retiring officers go unreplaced.

MAY 7, 2018

Hosted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, [a] daylong conference on May 7, 2018, was supposed to mine a calamity from the past for lessons on the present and warnings for the future. There were sessions titled “Nature Against Man” and “Innovations for Pandemic Countermeasures.” Implicit was the understanding that while the 1918 pandemic was a singular catastrophe, conditions in the 21st century were ideal for another outbreak.

Long before the coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China, and then soon spread to nearly every country on Earth, the 2018 conference offered proof that epidemiologists at the CDC and other institutions were aware that a new pandemic was poised to strike. They discussed troubling developments. They pointed to obvious gaps in the nation’s defenses. They braced themselves for what they feared was coming.

“Are we ready to respond to a pandemic?” asked Dr. Luciana Borio, who was head of the since dissolved global health section of the National Security Council.

Dr. Borio answered her own question: “I fear the answer is no.” She was discussing the influenza but could have just as easily been referencing the coronavirus, given the similarities between the two infections.

AUGUST 2018

Trump is warned that his tariffs on Chinese goods will lead to a shortage in medical equipment due to most such equipment coming from China. Trump ignored the warning and imposed the tariffs, creating the exact shortage he was warned of.

SEPTEMBER 2018

The Trump administration received detailed plans for a new machine designed to churn out millions of protective respirator masks at high speed during a pandemic.

The plans, submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) by medical manufacturer O&M Halyard, were the culmination of a venture unveiled almost three years earlier by the Obama administration.

But HHS did not proceed with making the machine.

APRIL 2019

“Of course, the thing that people ask: ‘What keeps you most up at night in the biodefense world?’ Pandemic flu, of course. I think everyone in this room probably shares that concern,” [Health and Human Services Secretary Alex] Azar said, before listing off efforts to mitigate the impact of flu outbreaks. (BioDefense Summit in April 2019.)

JULY 2019

Trump eliminated a key American public health position in Beijing intended to help detect disease outbreaks in China, leaving the US without an observer on the ground in the most likely spot in the world to spark a global pandemic.

SEPTEMBER 2019

Two months before the novel coronavirus is thought to have begun its deadly advance in Wuhan, China, the Trump administration ended a $200-million pandemic early-warning program aimed at training scientists in China and other countries to detect and respond to such a threat.
The project, launched by the U.S. Agency for International Development in 2009, identified 1,200 different viruses that had the potential to erupt into pandemics, including more than 160 novel coronaviruses. The initiative, called PREDICT, also trained and supported staff in 60 foreign laboratories — including the Wuhan lab that identified SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

Field work ceased when the funding ran out in September, and organizations that worked on the PREDICT program laid off dozens of scientists and analysts, said Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a key player in the program.

SEPTEMBER 2019 (October, maybe?)

White House economists publish a study that warned a pandemic disease could kill a half million Americans and devastate the economy. The report is ignored. [The study is located here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Mitigating-the-Impact-of-Pandemic-Influenza-through-Vaccine-Innovation.pdf ]

OCTOBER 2019

The Department of Health and Human Services conducted a series of exercises, called Operation Crimson Contagion, about a hypothetical virus that: emerged from China; caused a fever and respiratory illness; was spread around the world by air travel; and generated a global pandemic. As The New York Times reports, operation “Crimson Contagion” was actually a series of exercises intended to test every aspect of the government’s response to the outbreak of a novel disease. The “not to be disclosed” report showed the results of that test were nothing short of terrible. Without clear guidance, federal agencies sparred over their roles in fighting the disease. Without advance planning, hospitals and other facilities were short on materials and overrun with cases. Without any coordination from federal offices, states and localities were left on their own when it came to determining things like school closings and other restrictions. The whole thing was a fair description of chaos.


OCTOBER 25, 2019

The Trump Administration shuts down the Predict program:
Predict, an animal virus surveillance program run by the United States Agency for International Development, is shutting down after 10 years of research, according to The New York Times. Launched after an H5N1 bird flu outbreak, Predict was part of an effort to search for previously undiscovered zoonotic diseases, which are passed from animals to humans. Viruses such as AIDS, SARS, MERS, Ebola, and certain influenza strains originally came from animals.

Researchers found more than 1,000 new viruses from animal samples collected during the program’s run, including a new Ebola strain. In addition, it provided disease outbreak prevention training for thousands of people and strengthened medical laboratories in developing countries.

The program, which partnered with universities, conservation groups, and nonprofits to track, monitor, and prevent disease, was shut down at the end of its 10-year funding cycle. Some public health officials worry that its end could leave the world more vulnerable to dangerous epidemics. “Predict needed to go on for 20 years, not 10,” says Jonathan Epstein, a veterinarian with the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, a Predict partner organization, to the Times.

Some projects will be continued by other government agencies, but the focus on training health workers abroad will be reduced. The end of Predict “is really unfortunate, and the opposite of what we’d like to see happening,” Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former prime minister of Norway and the former World Health Organization director-general, tells the Times. “Americans need to understand how much their health security depends on that of other countries, often countries that have no capacity to do this themselves,” she adds.

Biden on Twitter: "We are not prepared for a pandemic. Trump has rolled back progress President Obama and I made to strengthen global health security. We need leadership that builds public trust, focuses on real threats, and mobilizes the world to stop outbreaks before they reach our shores."

NOVEMBER 2019

Intel officials brief the White House on the existence of an unknown pathogen in China.


U.S. intelligence agencies sends warnings of an outbreak in China to the Israeli government.

DECEMBER 2019

--Intel officials brief the National Security Council about the outbreak in China.

HERE IS A TIMELINE FROM NATIONAL REVIEW ON THE EXTENT OF CHINA’S ATTEMPTS TO SPREAD MISINFORMATION OR TO CONCEAL THE SEVERITY OF COVID-19:
JANUARY 1, 2020 (or thereabout)

The first time Dr. Robert Redfield heard about the severity of the virus from his Chinese counterparts was around New Year’s Day, when he was on vacation with his family. He spent so much time on the phone that they barely saw him. And what he heard rattled him; in one grim conversation about the virus days later, George F. Gao, the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, burst into tears.

JANUARY 2, 2020

The CDC contacts the National Security Council to warn of the unknown pathogen.

EARLY JANUARY 2020

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.

JANUARY 3, 2020

The White House got its first formal notification about coronavirus on Jan 3. Within days, US spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of the threat by including the first of many warnings in the President’s Daily Brief.

JANUARY 3 TO MARCH 21, 2020

The U.S. suffered from a lack of tests

JANUARY 4, 2020

The World Heallth Org. tweeted "#China has reported to WHO a cluster of #pneumonia cases —with no deaths— in Wuhan, Hubei Province Flag of China. Investigations are underway to identify the cause of this illness."

JANUARY AND FEBRUARY 2020

--U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments and security threats.

For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences.

But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience for even the oral summary he takes two or three times per week, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.


--According to Caitlin B. Oakley, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services China “stalled for weeks” in allowing WHO experts to visit in January and February, “and the WHO never criticized them for the delay and even praised China for its ‘transparency.’”

Nonetheless, more than a dozen U.S. researchers, physicians and public health experts, many of them from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were working full time at the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization as the novel coronavirus emerged late last year and transmitted real-time information about its discovery and spread in China to the Trump administration, according to U.S. and international officials.

A number of CDC staff members are regularly detailed to work at the WHO in Geneva as part of a rotation that has operated for years. Senior Trump-appointed health officials also consulted regularly at the highest levels with the WHO as the crisis unfolded, the officials said.
The presence of so many U.S. officials undercuts President Trump’s assertion that the WHO’s failure to communicate the extent of the threat, born of a desire to protect China, is largely responsible for the rapid spread of the virus in the United States.

JANUARY 7, 2020

The CDC established a coronavirus incident management system to better share and respond to information about the virus.

JANUARY 9, 2020

WHO released a "national capacities review tool" [which] is to ... help national authorities to i) identify main gaps ii) perform risk assessments and iii) plan for additional investigations, response and control actions."

JANUARY 10, 2020 (or) JANUARY 11, 2020

China published coronavirus genome allowing tests to be developed. While South Korea was able to roll out widespread testing in early February 2020, Trump’s CDC would be unable to produce a reliable test until late March.

Chinese researchers made the sequence of the virus public.

JANUARY 11, 2020

The CDC issued a Level I travel health notice for Wuhan, China.

JANUARY 12, 2020

WHO tweeted "Whole genome sequences for the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) from the Chinese authorities were shared with WHO and have also been submitted by Chinese authorities to the GISAID platform so that they can be accessed by public health authorities, laboratories and researchers.

JANUARY 13, 2020

WHO tweeted there was a new case of the coronavirus in Thailand.

JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2020

Trump’s CDC declined to copy the WHO coronavirus test and created its own faulty test, leaving the US without testing until late March and losing the chance of containment. Trump’s FDA also hampered private test development efforts.

JANUARY 2020

Without wearing PPE, Trump’s HHS employees entered a hangar where coronavirus evacuees were being received at an Air Force base in California, and then moved freely on and off the base, likely sparking the spread of the virus in California.

JANUARY 17, 2020

Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, says that Japan and Thailand are already using the genetic sequence to detect cases, adding: “We at the CDC have the ability to do that today — but we are working on a more specific diagnostic.’’

JANUARY 18, 2020

The top health official, Azar, called Trump on Jan. 18 to warn him about coronavirus. Before he could get a word in, Trump interjected to berate him about a fumbled vaping flavor ban. Azar asked a confidante for advice about how to break through to Trump.

JANUARY 20, 2020

The first confirmed case of the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in South Korea was announced.

The first confirmed case of 2019-nCoV infection in the United States.
WHO Tweet: It is now very clear from the latest information that there is at least some human-to-human transmission of #nCoV2019. Infections among health care workers strengthen the evidence for this.

https://twitter.com/WHOWPRO/status/1219478544041930752

JANUARY 22, 2020

Trump made his first public comments about the coronavirus in a television interview from Davos with CNBC’s Joe Kernen. The first American case had been announced the day before, and Kernen asked Trump, “Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?”

The president responded: “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

“We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” — Trump in a CNBC interview.

The president tells CNBC that “we have it totally under control” and “it’s going to be just fine.”
Ron Klain, a Biden adviser who managed the 2014 Ebola response, co-writes a piece excoriating Trump for “brashly” dismissing coronavirus as “under control,” while calling for “expertise” to “guide critical decisions” and noting “reasons for great concern.”

--Trump Tweet: “One of the many great things about our just signed giant Trade Deal with China is that it will bring both the USA & China closer together in so many other ways. Terrific working with President Xi, a man who truly loves his country. Much more to come!”

JANUARY 23, 2020

The WHO was already warning that coronavirus could “appear in any country,” and urged all countries to be “prepared for containment” and get ready to exercise “isolation” and “prevention” measures against its spread.

JANUARY 24, 2020

Trump Tweet:
“China has been working very hard to contain the coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American people, I want to thank President Xi!”


Trump Tweet in regard to the coronavirus outbreak:
“It will all work out well.”

In the United Kingdom, it took just an hour to brush aside the coronavirus threat. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, bounced out of Whitehall after chairing the meeting and breezily told reporters the risk to the UK public was “low”.

This was despite the publication that day of an alarming study by Chinese doctors in the medical journal, The Lancet. It assessed the lethal potential of the virus, for the first time suggesting it was comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed up to 50 million people.

Unusually, Boris Johnson had been absent from Cobra. The committee — which includes ministers, intelligence chiefs and military generals — gathers at moments of great peril such as terrorist attacks, natural disasters and other threats to the nation and is normally chaired by the prime minister.

JANUARY 26, 2020

China's health minister warned that people can spread the virus before showing symptoms, making the virus much harder to contain. A veteran adviser for a US health agency told CNN this bit of information was a "game changer."

JANUARY 27, 2020

--White House aides met with then-acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to try to get senior officials to take the virus threat more seriously, the Washington Post reports. Joe Grogan, the head of the White House Domestic Policy Council, warned it could cost Trump his re-election.

--Yet even if Trump did not know what was happening, other Americans did. On January 27, former Vice President Joe Biden sounded the alarm about a global pandemic in an op-ed in USA Today. By the end of January, eight cases of the virus had been confirmed in the United States. Hundreds more must have been incubating undetected.

--Trump Tweet: “We are in very close communication with China concerning the virus. Very few cases reported in USA, but strongly on watch. We have offered China and President Xi any help necessary. Our experts are extraordinary.”

JANUARY 28, 2020

Tom Frieden, a former director at the CDC, told Bloomberg News that it was "very clear that this is a serious epidemic" noting that the virus was more contagious than SARS. "So the possibilities here go from the bad, to the very, very bad," Frieden said.

Trump retweeted a headline from One America News, an outlet with a history of spreading false conspiracy theories: “Johnson & Johnson to create coronavirus vaccine.”

A Veterans Affairs official worried in January that the W.H.O. and C.D.C. were slow to address the spread of the virus.

A former Bush and Obama adviser compared the outbreak to major disasters in world history.
Dr. James Lawler, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Nebraska who served in the White House under President George W. Bush and as an adviser to President Barack Obama, was also a regular participant in the email chain. He stayed in regular communication with federal officials as the United States attempted to figure out how to respond to the virus. From the beginning he predicted this would be a major public health event.


JANUARY 29, 2020

Despite Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a millions deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.

JANUARY 30, 2020

The first case of person-to-person transmission in the US was reported.

The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. 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. Azar warned Trump that the virus could become a pandemic and that China should be criticized for its lack of transparency, per the Times. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist. Trump dismissed Azar as alarmist and rejected the idea of criticizing China. 

The World Health Organization declares an international health emergency.

Trump, during a speech in Michigan, said: “We have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five. And those people are all recuperating successfully.”
 We think we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five — and those people are all recuperating successfully. But we’re working very closely with China and other countries, and we think it’s going to have a very good ending for us … that I can assure you.” — Trump in a speech in Michigan.

Secretary Wilbur Ross says coronavirus will be good for American jobs: "I think it will help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America."

JANUARY 31, 2020

--Trump took his only early, aggressive action against the virus on Jan. 31: He barred most foreigners who had recently visited China from entering the United States. It was a good move.
But it was only one modest move, not the sweeping solution that Trump portrayed it to be. It didn’t apply to Americans who had been traveling in China, for example. And while it generated some criticism from Democrats, it wasn’t nearly as unpopular as Trump has since suggested.
Trump banned foreign nationals who had been to China from entering the US, but allowed US citizens to travel daily to and from China resulting in hundreds of people entering the US from China each day with no screening or testing.


--Trump: "Well, we pretty much shut it down coming in from China. We have a tremendous relationship with China, which is a very positive thing. Getting along with China, getting along with Russia"

--Joe Biden tells reporters in Iowa that “science” must “lead the way,” adding: “We have, right now, a crisis with the coronavirus.”

--(From Foreign Policy) It is revealed that in the spring of 2018, the White House pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era disease security programs, proposing to eliminate $252 million in previously committed resources for rebuilding health systems in Ebola-ravaged Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Under fire from both sides of the aisle, President Donald Trump dropped the proposal to eliminate Ebola funds a month later. But other White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. And the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated.

FEBRUARY 1, 2020

Joe Biden tweets: “We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science.”

FEBRUARY 2, 2020

Trump goes on Sean Hannity’s show and claims: “We pretty much shut it down, coming in from China.” Trump extols our “tremendous relationship” with China, and adds: “We did shut it down, yes.”

New York City  health commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot,  reassured commuters that “this is not something that you’re going to contract in the subway or on the bus.” The mayor reiterated the point several times in early March.

See this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/nyregion/new-york-coronavirus-response-delays.html  

FEBRUARY 3, 2020

--An unclassified briefing document on the novel coronavirus prepared on Feb. 3 by U.S. Army-North projected that “between 80,000 and 150,000 could die.” It framed the projection as a “Black Swan” analysis, meaning an outlier event of extreme consequence but often understood as an unlikely one. 

[The] Army made some of the assumptions that other agencies were making at the time—specifically that China was vastly underreporting cases and that the true case fatality rate of COVID-19 was much lower than statistics at the time indicated. So the Army projection calls for a full one third of the nation to be infected, but projects that 80 million cases will result in only 300,000 to 500,000 needed to be hospitalized, and eventually that 80,000 to 150,000 deaths. That’s a hospitalization rate well below 1% and an overall fatality rate of about a 0.1%. 

-- Beijing accuses the United States of creating unnecessary panic over the deadly new coronavirus strain that has killed 361 people in China and infected more than 17,000 others around the globe. The Chinese foreign ministry said Monday that Washington has failed to offer any meaningful assistance during the health crisis. “All it has done could only create and spread fear, which is a bad example,” said ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying. The U.S. was the first nation to suggest withdrawing some of its embassy staff from China, and the first to impose a ban on Chinese travelers. “It is precisely developed countries like the United States with strong epidemic prevention capabilities and facilities that have taken the lead in imposing excessive restrictions contrary to WHO recommendations,” Hua added.

FEBRUARY 4, 2020

The CDC receives the first “emergency use authorization” from the FDA and prepares to distribute its test more widely. The CDC will ship out about 200 test kits to labs nationwide. It is the only test kit design available in the United States.

FEBRUARY 5, 2020

--The C.D.C. began shipping coronavirus test kits to laboratories around the country. But the tests suffered from a technical flaw and didn’t produce reliable results, labs discovered.

--The technical problems were understandable: Creating a new virus test is not easy. What’s less understandable, experts say, is why the Trump administration officials were so lax about finding a work-around, even as other countries were creating reliable tests.

--Trump received a request from HHS Secretary Azar for $2 billion to buy respirator masks and other supplies for the national stockpile, but Trump supplied only 25% of the requested funds.

--Trump administration officials declined an offer of early congressional funding assistance that a group of senators made on Feb. 5 during a meeting to discuss the coronavirus. The officials, including Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, said they “didn’t need emergency funding, that they would be able to handle it within existing appropriations.”

--Trump overrode the CDC and ordered that 14 passengers infected with the coronavirus be flown home in a plane full of uninfected people. washingtonpost.com/health/coronav… 

--The Trump administration could have begun to use a functioning test from the World Health Organization, but didn’t. It could have removed regulations that prevented private hospitals and labs from quickly developing their own tests, but didn’t. The inaction meant that the United States fell behind South Korea, Singapore and China in fighting the virus. “We just twiddled our thumbs as the coronavirus waltzed in,” William Hanage, a Harvard epidemiologist, wrote.

Trump, for his part, spent these first weeks of February telling Americans that the problem was going away.

FEBRUARY 6, 2020

An American citizen dies of coronavirus in China as Trump praises Xi’s efforts.

FEBRUARY 7, 2020

A study was published in the medical journal JAMA, which found that found that 41% of the first 138 patients diagnosed at one hospital in Wuhan, China, were presumed to be infected in that hospital. The study's results indicated that the virus was very infectious. Some researchers were warning of the contagious nature of the virus earlier in February as well.

In a series of tweets on February 7, Trump again praised the Chinese President's handling of the crisis.

"Just had a long and very good conversation by phone with President Xi of China. He is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus. He feels they are doing very well, even building hospitals in a matter of only days. Nothing is easy, but he will be successful, especially as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone. Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation. We are working closely with China to help!"

"I just spoke to President Xi last night, and, you know, we're working on the -- the problem, the virus. It's a -- it's a very tough situation. But I think he's going to handle it. I think he's handled it really well. We're helping wherever we can."

The Trump administration sends 18 tons of medical supplies to China.


FEBRUARY 8, 2020

Additional CDC test kits arrive at labs in New York, Nebraska, Colorado, Minnesota and elsewhere. By the end of the day, lab directors share bad news: They aren’t working properly. Through the weekend, lab directors share notes of the test and start to realize “this could be really bad.”

FEBRUARY 10, 2020
"I think China is very, you know, professionally run in the sense that they have everything under control," Trump said. "I really believe they are going to have it under control fairly soon. You know in April, supposedly, it dies with the hotter weather. And that's a beautiful date to look forward to. But China I can tell you is working very hard."

“Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do — you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat — as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We’re in great shape though. We have 12 cases — 11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.” — Trump at the White House. (See our item “Will the New Coronavirus ‘Go Away’ in April?“)

--“Coronavirus is not something that is going to have ripple effects.”-
White House acting budget director Russell Vought

FEBRUARY 11, 2020 

Biden goes on “Morning Joe” and excoriates Trump for claiming the coronavirus will disappear in the warm weather, crossing himself while doing so, and adding: “You couldn’t make it up.”

FEBRUARY 12, 2020

--Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases warned that the US "should be prepared for this new virus to gain a foothold" in the country and that "at some point we are likely to see community spread in the US or other countries."

--The first public hint of trouble with the test kits emerges when the CDC’s Messonnier mentions unspecified “issues’’ at the public health labs. “Some of the states identified some inconclusive laboratory results,’’ Messonnier tells reporters. “We have multiple levels of quality control to detect issues just like this one.”

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

--On February 13, Trump was asked by Fox News' Geraldo Rivera if he thought China was being truthful about coronavirus. The President called China "extremely capable" and professional in handling the outbreak.

--"Well, you never know. I think they want to put the best face on it. So you know, I mean, if somebody -- if you were running it, you'd probably -- you wouldn't want to run out to the world and go crazy and start saying whatever it is because you don't want to create a panic," he said. "But, no, I think they've handled it professionally and I think they're extremely capable and I think President Xi is extremely capable and I hope that it's going to be resolved."

--Azar testifies in Congress that the CDC is working with five cities to add coronavirus testing to its regular flu surveillance to see whether “there is broader spread than we have been able to detect so far.” The labs are in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Seattle. However, the tests do not work.

--Susan Butler-Wu, director of medical microbiology at the Los Angeles County and University of Southern California Medical Center, warns in an email in response to an inquiry from Congress: “We’re screwed from a testing standpoint if this thing takes off in the US."

FEBRUARY 14, 2020

“There’s a theory that, in April, when it gets warm — historically, that has been able to kill the virus.  So we don’t know yet; we’re not sure yet. But that’s around the corner.” — Trump in speaking to National Border Patrol Council members.

While speaking to National Border Patrol Council members, Trump said China was "working very hard on this."

"It's a tremendous problem," he added. "But they're very capable and they'll -- they'll get to it."
A memo was drafted by health officials in coordination with the National Security Council that recommended the targeted use of "quarantine and isolation measures," per the Times. Officials planned to present Trump with the memo when he returned from India on Feb. 25, but the meeting was canceled.


FEBRUARY 17, 2020

--Experts worried that it would be hard to convince society to order restrictions like school and business closures to slow the spread.

--Convincing governors and mayors to intentionally cause economic harm by ordering or promoting mitigation efforts — such as closing businesses — is always a difficult task. That is why it is so important, these medical experts said, for the federal government to take the lead, providing cover for the local officials to kick off the so-called Nonpharmaceutical Interventions, such as school and business closures. Again, this group of doctors and medical experts recognized from early on that this step was all but inevitable, even if the administration was slow to recognize the need.

--The Diamond Princess was an early case study of how quickly the virus could spread.
Strong evidence was emerging as of mid-February — with the first cases of Covid-19 already in the United States — that the nation was about to be hit hard. These doctors and medical experts researched how quickly the virus spread on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined in the port of Yokohama, Japan, on Feb. 3 before hundreds of United States citizens on the ship returned home.

Dr. Eva Lee, a researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology who has frequently worked with the federal government to create infectious disease projections, helped the Red Dawn group do modeling, based on the virus spread on the cruise ship. (Dr. Lee is facing sentencing on federal charges that she improperly applied for a federal grant for unrelated research.)

FEBRUARY 18, 2020

--“I don’t think corona is as big a threat as people make it out to be,” the acting chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Tomas Philipson, told reporters during a Feb. 18 briefing, on the same day that more than a dozen American cruise ship passengers who had contracted the virus were evacuated home. Public health threats did not typically hurt the economy, Mr. Philipson said. He suggested the virus would not be nearly as bad as a normal flu season.

"I think President Xi is working very hard," Trump said. "As you know, I spoke with him recently. He's working really hard. It's a tough problem. I think he's going to do -- look, I've seen them build hospitals in a short period of time. I really believe he wants to get that done, and he wants to get it done fast. Yes, I think he's doing it very professionally."

--Asked if he trusted the data from China, the President declined to answer the question, instead, again, praising the Chinese President.

"Look, I know this: President Xi loves the people of China, he loves his country, and he's doing a very good job with a very, very tough situation," he said.

FEBRUARY 19, 2020

--The Chinese CDC, in a study of more than 72,000 confirmed and suspected cases of the novel coronavirus, found that the virus was more contagious than the related viruses that cause SARS and MERS.

Trump told a Phoenix television station, “I think the numbers are going to get progressively better as we go along.”

FEBRUARY 21, 2020

The White House coronavirus task force conducted a mock exercise of the pandemic. The group concluded that the U.S. would need to implement aggressive social distancing, even if it caused mass disruption to the economy and American lives, per the Times.

When Dr. Robert Kadlec, the top disaster response official at the Health and Human Services Department, convened the White House coronavirus task force on Feb. 21, his agenda was urgent. There were deep cracks in the administration’s strategy for keeping the virus out of the United States. They were going to have to lock down the country to prevent it from spreading. The question was: When?

THIRD WEEK OF FEBRUARY 2020

By the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. 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.

FEBRUARY 23, 2020

--“We have it very much under control in this country.” — Trump in speaking to reporters.

--The World Health Organization announced that the virus was in 30 countries, with 78,811 confirmed cases, a more than fivefold increase over the previous three weeks.

--Navarro doubled down on his warnings in another memo, this time addressed to the president, stating that up to 2 million Americans could die of the virus.

--Speaking to reporters on February 23 on the White House South Lawn, Trump was asked if Xi should be doing anything differently in his handling of the crisis.

"No, I think President Xi is working very, very hard. I spoke to him. He's working very hard. I think he's doing a very good job. It's a big problem. But President Xi loves his country. He's working very hard to solve the problem and he will solve the problem. OK?"

--February was a tipping point for some experts.

The concern the medical experts had been raising in late January and early February turned to alarm by the third week in February. That was when they effectively concluded that the United States had already lost the fight to contain the virus, and that it needed to switch to mitigation. One critical element in that shift was the realization that many people in the country were likely already infected and capable of spreading the virus, but not showing any symptoms. Dr. Lee discussed this conclusion with Dr. Robert Kadlec, the head of the virus response effort at the Department of Health and Human Services and a key White House adviser.

FEBRUARY 24, 2020

--Trump attempted to manipulate the stock market stating that it is “starting to look very good,” despite later claiming to know at the time of his statement that the world faced a serious pandemic that would surely destroy the US economy.

 --“The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” — Trump in a tweet.

--Financial markets in the United States suffered the first of a sequence of crashes. The Dow plunged over 1,000 points.

--From The Washington Times:

Feb. 24, meanwhile, was China’s deadliest day from COVID-19; if Beijing’s possibly suspect statistics are to be believed, 149 people died from the coronavirus on that day. That afternoon, an Air China 777 arrived at JFK after a 13-hour flight from Beijing. The following day, Los Angeles International Airport welcomed flights from both Beijing and Shanghai.

That the Trump administration “banned flights,” “closed the borders,” or “stopped flights” from first China and later the European Union to halt the spread of COVID-19 has become a staple of its defense of its response to the pandemic. But it simply isn’t true. At no time through the course of this awful period have flights even once been halted between either China and the U.S. or Europe — including even Italy — and the United States.

The Trump administration did impose travel restrictions between China and the U.S., and later Europe and the U.S., but both actions have loopholes large enough to fly a 777 through. In the case of China, on Jan. 31 — weeks after it was known that the coronavirus was a serious problem — the administration restricted travel for “foreign nationals who had been in China in the last 14 days.”
That means that Americans — just as capable as carrying and transmitting a contagious viral infection as foreigners — had free passage between China and the U.S. And so daily flights between China and the U.S. continued. (And yes, even these limited restrictions were slammed as being too punitive at the time.)

The Trump administration’s alleged Europe travel ban, announced to much fanfare earlier this month, is similarly weak. It too exempts Americans from any restrictions whatsoever, and the screening that returning Americans have been subjected to at airports has been laughably weak. Passengers have been given a form to fill out (which many travelers have reported aren’t even being collected), waved through immigration, and then simply urged to self-quarantine. It’s like the honor system, but for containing a deadly pandemic.


House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited San Francisco’s Chinatown on Feb. 24. To view videos of her visits two months later is almost jarring, as she strolls arm-in-arm and walks amid a crowd. She made clear the point of her visit was to show it was “very safe to be in Chinatown,” which had been hit hard by a drop in tourism after reports of the virus emerging from China.

Asked whether she had confidence in the federal government, Pelosi did not mention Trump but said she had confidence in Anthony S. Fauci of the National Institutes of Health. “Prevention, prevention, prevention,” she said. “We want people to be concerned and vigilant. However, we don’t want them to be afraid.”

Other than a reference to a parade that took place two weeks earlier, Pelosi did not propose a parade, a street fair or a party, as Trump claimed. She never indicated she doubted the virus existed, as Trump claimed. She promoted Chinese businesses, even tweeting a brief video of her making fortune cookies.

Trump falsely claimed she had deleted a tweet of her visit to Chinatown. The video in Trump’s tweet came from a news clip, and there is no record of Pelosi deleting such a tweet.

There is also no evidence Pelosi was responsible for “many deaths.” As of April 22, there have been a total of 21 deaths in San Francisco County; the first death was not announced until March 25, a month after her trip to Chinatown.

Chinatown, in fact, had no covid-19 cases as of mid-April in its 22 blocks, according to a report published by the New York Times. “Despite being particularly vulnerable to the novel coronavirus in the United States, Chinatown turned out to be well-prepared, unlike other places around the country,” the article said, citing a community plan of action that was put in place on Feb. 1, emphasizing frequent hand-cleaning, availability of sanitizers and education on basic hygiene principles, including frequent use of masks

Not nearly enough has been said about this case. It happened at Vacaville, California, right next to Travis Air Force Base where passengers from the Diamond Princess landed after being brought home.

That included 14 who had tested positive for covid-19, who were flown home by the State Dept against CDC advice. The CDC not only advised against putting them in the same plane as the uninfected evacuees -- which was done -- it advised against returning them to the US at all until they were recovered.

Coronavirus-infected Americans flown home against CDC’s advice https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/coronavirus-diamond-princess-cruise-americans/2020/02/20/b6f54cae-5279-11ea-b119-4faabac6674f_story.html

They were met at Travis AFB by Health Dept staff who were wearing no proper protection, and who then took commercial flights home.

U.S. workers without protective gear assisted coronavirus evacuees, HHS whistleblower says
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/02/27/us-workers-without-protective-gear-assisted-coronavirus-evacuees-hhs-whistleblower-says/

Soon after, the woman in Vacaville developed symptoms. This was back when the Trump administration were trying to hide their lack of tests by refusing to test anyone without a known China connection. Only after a week did UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento finally persuade the CDC to test her, and she became the first known domestically-transmitted US case.

https://www.livescience.com/california-coronavirus-patient-not-tested-for-days.html
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-02-27/california-coronavirus-patient-was-not-tested-for-several-days-uc-davis-says
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/02/27/coronavirus-testing-california/

Her infection came courtesy not of Nancy Pelosi, but of Mike Pompeo

-- “You should seriously consider buying these [stock market] dips”
[Note: The Dow Jones ended February 24 at 27,960. It closed March 11 at 23,553]


FEBRUARY 25, 2020

--Presidential economic advisor Larry Kudlow states that the virus has been “contained”.

--On the same day Larry Kudlow said coronavirus was “contained”, Trump’s campaign spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany made an even more bold claim. “We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here...and isn't it refreshing when contrasting it with the awful presidency of President Obama."

--Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Nancy Messonnier publicly warned of the virus threat and said "we need to be preparing for significant disruption in our lives.” Trump reportedly called Azar fuming that Messonnier had scared people unnecessarily and caused the stock market to plummet, per the Times.

--On Feb. 25, Trump said that China was “working very, very hard” to contain coronavirus, adding that “they’re getting it more and more under control,” which led Trump to conclude that for the United States, coronavirus was a “problem that’s going to go away.”

--Biden had voiced that same sentiment the day before, insisting that he would “insist, insist, insist” that China show more transparency about what was going on with coronavirus.

--Trump falsely claims "nobody had ever even heard of Ebola" in 2014:
Comparing the coronavirus outbreak with the Ebola situation of 2014, Trump said, "At that time, nobody had ever even heard of Ebola."

FEBRUARY 26, 2020

--At the coronavirus briefing on February 26, for example, Trump said all of the following: "This is a flu. This is like a flu"; "Now, you treat this like a flu"; "It's a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for. And we'll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner."

 “So we’re at the low level. As they get better, we take them off the list, so that we’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. So we’ve had very good luck.” — Trump at a White House briefing.

 “And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” — Trump at a press conference.

 “I think every aspect of our society should be prepared. I don’t think it’s going to come to that, especially with the fact that we’re going down, not up. We’re going very substantially down, not up.” — Trump at a press conference, when asked if “U.S. schools should be preparing for a coronavirus spreading.” Biden directly rebutted this line, saying: “I would not be taking China’s word for it. I would insist that China allow our scientists in to make a hard determination of how it started, where it’s from, how far along it is.”

Trump was scheduled to meet with top infectious disease experts to discuss urgent social distancing steps. Instead, the meeting was cancelled because Trump was mad about bad press.

“I spoke with President Xi.  We had a great talk.  He’s working very hard, I have to say.  He’s working very, very hard.  And if you can count on the reports coming out of China, that spread has gone down quite a bit.  The infection seems to have gone down over the last two days.  As opposed to getting larger, it’s actually gotten smaller.  In one instance where we think we can be — it’s somewhat reliable, it seems to have gotten quite a bit smaller.”—Trump

--Over nearly three weeks from Feb. 26 to March 16, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States grew from 15 to 4,226.

FEBRUARY 27, 2020

-- “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” — Trump at a White House meeting with African American leaders.

--Trump calls concerns about the coronavirus and warnings of a pandemic to be the “new hoax” of the Democrats.

--Redfield, the CDC director, testifies to the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and nonproliferation that the “CDC believes that the immediate risk of this new virus to the American public is low.”

On a conference call with a range of health officials, a senior FDA official lashes out at the CDC for its repeated lapses.

Jeffrey Shuren, the FDA’s director for devices and radiological health, tells the CDC that if it were subjected to the same scrutiny as a privately run lab, “I would shut you down.”
Privately, the CDC concludes that a “much broader” effort to testing is needed.

FEBRUARY 28, 2020

--Due to CDC and other agency pronouncements undermining Trump’s attempts to downplay the seriousness of the virus, Trump muzzled all federal agencies by requiring Pence to approve all coronavirus communications before dissemination.

--On February 28, then–White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference, near Washington, D.C.:
The reason you’re ... seeing so much attention to [the virus] today is that [the media] think this is gonna be what brings down this president. This is what this is all about. I got a note from a reporter saying, “What are you gonna do today to calm the markets.” I’m like: Really, what I might do today to calm the markets is tell people to turn their televisions off for 24 hours ... This is not Ebola, okay? It’s not SARS, it’s not MERS.

--Trump shouts at a rally in South Carolina that Democrats’ criticism of his response (which proved entirely accurate) is “their new hoax.”

At that same rally Trump said: "The Democrat policy of open borders is a direct threat to the health and well-being of all Americans. Now you see it with the coronavirus, you see it. You see it with the coronavirus."

--From Feb. 28 testimony in the House Foreign Affairs Committee:

REP. TED LIEU (D-CA): Donald Trump's chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told the Conservative Political Action Conference that the coronavirus was the hoax of the day. Do you agree with Donald Trump's chief of staff, Mulvaney, that the coronavirus is the hoax of the day? Pompeo refuses multiple times to answer the question.

--Dozens of clinical laboratory scientists from across the nation write to Congress asking for permission to create new tests, saying “this regulatory process is significantly more stringent than that required for every other virus we test for.”

Forty-seven days after the Chinese had distributed the virus’s genetic sequence, the CDC abandons the test’s once-touted third component. Messonnier announces that the component “can be excluded from testing without affecting accuracy.’’

Biden goes on CNN and says Trump has yet to “gain control” of the coronavirus, while calling on Trump to stop downplaying it and urging him instead to “let the experts take this over” and “let the experts speak.”

FEBRUARY 29, 2020

 --“And I’ve gotten to know these professionals. They’re incredible. And everything is under control. I mean, they’re very, very cool. They’ve done it, and they’ve done it well. Everything is really under control.” — Trump in a speech at the CPAC conference outside Washington, D.C.

--The first person in the United States known to have succumbed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, dies.

-- “And I want to say that China seems to be making tremendous progress.  Their numbers are way down.  And if you read, Tim Cook of Apple said that they are now in full operation again in China.  Their numbers are way down.” –Trump

LATE FEBRUARY 2020

The Trump Administration turns down an offer of tests from the World Health Organization:

Why the United States declined to use the WHO test, even temporarily as a bridge until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could produce its own test, remains a perplexing question and the key to the Trump administration’s failure to provide enough tests to identify the coronavirus infections before they could be passed on, according to POLITICO interviews with dozens of viral-disease experts, former officials and some officials within the administration’s health agencies.
The slowness of the testing regimen — which, administration officials acknowledged this week, is still not producing enough tests to meet the national demand — was the first, and most sweeping, of many failures. So far there have been confirmed cases in at least 23 states, and at least 15 deaths, while the stock market plunged and an otherwise healthy economy braced for a major disruption.


MARCH 2, 2020

Dr. Kadlec and other administration officials decided the next day to recommend to Mr. Trump that he publicly support the start of these mitigation efforts, such as school closings. But before they could discuss it with the president, who was returning from India, another official went public with a warning, sending the stock market down sharply and angering Mr. Trump. The meeting to brief him on the recommendation was canceled and it was three weeks before Mr. Trump would reluctantly come around to the need for mitigation.
This slow pace of action was confusing to the medical experts on the Red Dawn email chain, who were increasingly alarmed that cities and states that were getting hit hard by the virus needed to move faster to take aggressive steps.

-- “I’ve heard very quick numbers, that of months.”


[Note: Immunologist Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has repeatedly said that a vaccine will not be available for a year or year and a half.]

MARCH 3, 2020

--“Six weeks ago, eight weeks ago, you never heard of this.” –Trump

--Oregon sent a letter to Vice President Mike Pence asking for 400,000 N95 masks. For days, it got no response, and only by March 14 received its first shipment, of 36,800 masks. But there was a problem. Most of the equipment they got was well past the expiration date and so “wouldn’t be suitable for surgical settings,” the state said.

--New York City also put in a request for more than 2 million masks and only received 76,000; all were expired, said Deanne Criswell, New York City’s emergency management commissioner.

MARCH 4, 2020

“[W]e have a very small number of people in this country [infected]. We have a big country. The biggest impact we had was when we took the 40-plus people [from a cruise ship]. … We brought them back. We immediately quarantined them. But you add that to the numbers. But if you don’t add that to the numbers, we’re talking about very small numbers in the United States.” — Trump at a White House meeting with airline CEOs.

“Well, I think the 3.4% is really a false number.” — Trump in an interview on Fox News, referring to the percentage of diagnosed COVID-19 patients worldwide who had died, as reported by the World Health Organization. (See our item “Trump and the Coronavirus Death Rate.”)

Trump’s HHS admitted the US only had 1% of face masks needed for “full-blown” coronavirus pandemic.


(From CNN): Trump falsely claims Obama impeded testing

Trump claimed he had reversed a decision by President Barack Obama's administration that had impeded testing for the coronavirus, saying that "the Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we're doing. And we undid that decision a few days ago so that the testing can take place in a much more accurate and rapid fashion. That was a decision we disagreed with." He said on March 5: "They made some decisions which were not good decisions...We undid some of the regulations that were made that made it very difficult, but I'm not blaming anybody."

There is no Obama-era decision or rule that impeded coronavirus testing. The Obama administration did put forward a draft proposal related to lab testing, but it was never implemented.

--Trump falsely claims the Obama administration "didn't do anything" about H1N1
Trump said of H1N1, also known as swine flu: "And they didn't do anything about it."
The Obama administration did respond to H1N1. On April 26, 2009, less than two weeks after the first US cases of H1N1 were confirmed, the Obama administration declared a public health emergency. Two days later, the Obama administration made an initial $1.5 billion funding request to Congress. (Congress ultimately allocated $7.7 billion). In October 2009, Obama declared a national emergency to allow hospitals more flexibility for a possible flood of H1N1 patients.
The Obama administration did face criticism over the pace of the government's vaccination effort, but "they didn't do anything" is clearly false.

-- Trump’s HHS admitted the US only had 1% of face masks needed for “full-blown” coronavirus pandemic.

MARCH 6, 2020

--Presidential spokesperson Kellyanne Conway asserts that the virus has been contained.

--“We closed it down, we stopped it.” –Trump

--Trump on March 6, explaining he'd rather have sick passengers stay offshore on a cruise ship: "I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault."

--Trump incorrectly stated: “Anybody that needs a test, gets a test." In fact, the nation is desperate for more testing, leading some states to conserve testing for only health-care workers.

--“I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. . . . Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”


-- “I didn’t know people died from the flu.”

--“We stopped it, it was a very early shut down, I would still argue to you that this thing is contained.”


MARCH 7, 2020

“No, I’m not concerned at all. No, we’ve done a great job with it.” — Trump, when asked by reporters if he was concerned about the arrival of the coronavirus in the Washington, D.C., area.

MARCH 7-8, 2020

Trump took a golf trip to Palm Beach and Mar-a-Lago, knowing that coronavirus was continuing to spread unchecked in the United States.


MARCH 8, 2020

--“They’re trying to scare everybody, from meetings, cancel the meetings, close the schools — you know, destroy the country. And that’s ok, as long as we can win the election.” –Trump
--In states with major outbreak like Washington and New York, local hospitals have reported a shortage of test kits to identify cases. As of March 8, the CDC had only conducted around 1,700 tests, compared to nearly 200,000 in South Korea

--Only 1,707 Americans have been tested by the CDC. This figure does not include other sources of testing. The overall rate of testing is about 18 per million.

MARCH 9, 2020

[Trump] tweeted: "So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths," "Think about that!" CNN's tally on March 9 was 565 confirmed cases.

MARCH 10, 2020

“And we’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.” — Trump after meeting with Republican senators.

A day later, on March 11, the WHO declared the global outbreak a pandemic.
 
--In early March, when Washington state requested 233,000 N95 respirators and 200,000 surgical masks, the Strategic National Stockpile sent them less than half that amount. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maine also said they received fractions of what they requested from the federal government.
But on March 10, after Washington’s request, Florida asked for 430,000 surgical masks, 180,000 N95 respirators, and other equipment. The full order arrived three days later. One anonymous official told the Washington Post, “The president knows Florida is so important for his reelection … He pays close attention to what Florida wants.”

MARCH 11, 2020

A former high-ranking Trump official weighed in with criticisms:
When Trump gave a speech to the nation on March 11 in which he announced limits on flights from Europe to the United States — but still no move to curb gatherings in cities where the virus had spread — the experts on the email chain grew angry and fearful. Among those questioning Mr. Trump’s decision was Tom Bossert, who had previously served as Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser:
 
 --The WHO declared the global outbreak a pandemic.

--“If we get rid of the coronavirus problem quickly, we won’t need [economic] stimulus.”

--Biden gives a speech stressing the importance of presidential truth-telling amid crises, noting that Trump’s ongoing falsifications risk leaving Americans without reliable guidance, compounding “public fears.”

MARCH 12, 2020

--President Donald Trump’s new European travel restrictions have a convenient side effect: They exempt nations where three Trump-owned golf resorts are located.

The United Kingdom, which is home to Trump Turnberry and Trump International Golf Links, and Ireland, which is home to another Trump-branded hotel and golf course at Doonbeg, do not participate in the Schengen Area. Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania are also not part of the Schengen Area. All three of the resorts are struggling financially.


--“We have ’em very heavily tested. If an American’s coming back, or anybody’s coming back, we’re testing. We have a tremendous testing setup where people coming in have to be tested. And if they are positive, and if they’re able to get through—because, frankly, if they’re not, we’re not putting them on planes, if it shows positive…”



 [Note. This is not true.]


-- According to a survey of epidemiologists the coronavirus outbreak probably won’t peak before May, meaning it will be getting worse and worse and worse over the next two months, and for much of that time, presumably, exponentially worse.

--New York City’s live theater industry shutdown for at least a month on Thursday, March 12, a day before the ban on gatherings of 500 or more people was set to go into effect. But that morning, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio was still holding out hope that a different decision could be reached.
"I don’t want to see Broadway go dark, if we can avoid it,” he told CNN that morning. “I want to see if we can strike some kind of balance.”

-- A spokesman for the Chinese government on promotes a conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was brought to the city of Wuhan by the U.S. military.

"It might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan," said Zhao Lijian, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, Business Insider reported.

The comment, an alternate explanation Beijing is pushing amid global criticism of the country's failure to mitigate the virus, comes as the Chinese government has increasingly disputed widespread international reporting that the virus was first detected in Wuhan.

MARCH 13, 2020

It took Trump until March 13 for Trump to declare the pandemic a national emergency, 19 days after the financial markets began their retreat.

Asked about the administration’s epic failure to ramp up testing, Trump declares: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

--By Friday, March 13, at least five other states less affected by coronavirus than New York had already shut down their schools in order to slow the spread of the COVID-19, as well as Los Angeles and San Diego, two of the largest school districts in the country. But Mayor Bill de Blasio wasn’t ready to make changes yet, even though about one-third of New York City public school students were absent that day. Two days later, on Sunday the 15th, after Cuomo announced city schools would be closed starting the next day, de Blasio confirmed the news.

MARCH 15, 2020

Biden responds to that Trump quote (about responsibility) by reiterating his call for widespread free testing, and by declaring: “It is the job of the president to take responsibility — and his response is unacceptable.”

MARCH 16, 2020

New York City mayor Bill De Blasio moved so slowly in responding to coronavirus, against the guidance of his top health officials, that some of them threatened to resign, according to reports on March 16 from The New York Times and the Daily News. De Blasio denied that anybody said they would resign, but seemed to admit to tensions, saying “people have had serious conversations,” but sources told the Daily News there major disagreements over the mayor’s “slow pace to adapt to information about how quickly (the disease) was advancing.”

MARCH 17, 2020

Trump  proclaims: “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
The U.S. death toll from coronavirus reaches 100.

MARCH 18, 2020

Trump finally signed executive order on the Defense Production Act to address massive shortages in PPE and ventilators across the US. Trump would spend the next 9 days saying he wouldn’t invoke the DPA and would only use it as “leverage.”


-- Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner has created his own coronavirus team to work alongside the official coronavirus task force, The Washington Post reports. The team reportedly consists of Kushner’s government allies and individuals from private industry who are focused on setting up drive-through testing sites and delivery of health care supplies. However, Kushner’s team has reportedly sowed confusion within the Trump administration—with some calling it a “shadow task force” that makes requests outside of the regular coronavirus response efforts. “We don’t know who these people are,” one official told the Post. “Who is this? We’re all getting these emails.”

MARCH 19, 2020

Californians ordered to stay at home to curtail the spread of the virus.

MARCH 20, 2020

--New York City has 5,600 confirmed cases. New York issues a stay at home order, beginning a war of words between Trump and a number of governors.

--Trump promoted unproven drug treatments as if they were miracle cures.

MARCH 21, 2020

--The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services placed its first large-scale order for N95 masks. Only then did the White House begin marshaling a national supply chain to meet the threat in earnest.

--Despite having known about the pandemic for months and having already sent 17.8 tons of strategic pandemic reserves to China, Trump launches an orchestrated campaign to accuse China of covering up the global pandemic.

MARCH 22, 2020

The White House promises there will be 27,000,000 testing kits by March 31. In mid-April there were still only 4,000,000.

MARCH 24-25, 2020

Trump floated the idea of terminating all social distancing and allowing the coronavirus to ravage the country.

MARCH 24, 2020

--Fox News asks Trump when he knew he had to "move" on coronavirus. Trump says that he first heard about what was happening in China in the media—not via any of the means the most powerful man in the world has at his disposal to hear about major national security threats.

In fact China informed the World Health Organization about coronavirus in 2019. DHHS and the NSA knew by January 3 at the latest. DHHS briefed Trump by January 18 at the latest. It's likely that Trump was first told in late December—over a month before he did anything.

--Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from states that were critical of his handling of the pandemic.

MARCH 25, 2020

“The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success. The real people want to get back to work ASAP. We will be stronger than ever before!” --Trump

MARCH 26, 2020

--The U.S. officially has more cases than any other nation.

--1,000 U.S. dead

Trump Claimed U.S. States Don't Need the Amount of Ventilators They're Asking for: “I Don't Believe You Need 40,000 or 30,000”


--(From Science) When Donald Trump recently touted the common malaria treatments hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine as potential remedies for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), he ignited unprecedented demand for the drugs—and set scientists’ teeth on edge. Although the World Health Organization (WHO) agrees the compounds are worth testing more fully on the pandemic coronavirus, few drug or infectious disease experts—not even the president’s own advisers—share his optimism that the drugs could become “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine,” as he tweeted. And many are critical of the small French clinical study of just 42 patients that seems to have touched off most of the excitement.

MARCH 28, 2020

2,000 U.S. dead

--Trump’s refusal to implement the Defense Production Act and coordinate procurement of medical equipment for states forced them to bid against each other, creating delays and price gouging that hampered attempts to contain and combat the virus.


MARCH 28, 2020

--Trump sent California 170 broken ventilators.


--Trump said he had a slush fund of $500 billion that he can dole out to himself and to corporations, and that he can simply ignore the limits placed by Congress on how he can spend the money.


--Trump calls former baseball player Alex Rodriguez seeking advice on coronavirus response.

--(From Politico): A review of the CARES Act suggests Democrats did manage to influence its direction, shifting some of its aid to individuals toward lower-income families, while imposing some conditions on its aid to businesses—changes that Trump is already taking credit for. They also inserted some oversight provisions that Trump has already vowed to ignore.
But Republicans won some huge concessions from Democrats, most notably a $500 billion bailout fund for big businesses and a $170 billion tax break for real estate investors like the president.

MARCH 29, 2020

Donald Trump has suggested hospital workers in New York of stealing and possibly selling face masks “out the back door” during an astounding press conference on Sunday evening.

Standing in the White House’s Rose Garden the president asked reporters to look into the supposed illegal activity but provided no evidence to back up his claims aside from increased demand for supplies from hospitals swamped by the coronavirus pandemic.

“For years [suppliers] have been delivering ten to twenty thousand masks. OK, it’s a New York hospital and it’s packed all the time but how do you go from ten to twenty thousand to 300,000?”
“Something’s going on and you ought to look into it as reporters.

“Where are the masks going? Are they going out the back door? And we have that in a lot of different places so somebody should probably look into that because I just don’t see from a practical standpoint how that’s possible.”

-- In a White House briefing in the Rose Garden, Trump referenced new data from his task force and said that between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths would represent a victory over the coronavirus.

--Medical supply manufacturers say they cannot figure out how to prioritize the supply of medical equipment among the states. Trump steadfastly refuses to intervene and nationalize the medical supply chain, leading to inefficiency and shortages.


MARCH 30, 2020

--Trump went on Fox & Friends, to defend his handling of the coronavirus outbreak. Here is a thing he said:
"Nobody could have predicted something like this . . ."
“A month ago, nobody ever heard of this. Nobody had any idea.”

--Trump suggests that 100,000 dead in the U.S. would be an indication of “a very good job”.

--On two occasions during Sunday's coronavirus briefing, Trump falsely denied he had said words he had said publicly last week.

When PBS's Yamiche Alcindor noted that the President had said he did not believe that governors actually need all the equipment they claimed they did, Trump said, "I didn't say that" — even though he said precisely that on Fox News on Thursday.

Later, when CNN White House Correspondent Jeremy Diamond noted that Trump had said he wanted governors to be "appreciative" of him, and that "if they don't treat you right, I don't call," Trump said, "But I didn't say that" — even though he said precisely that at the Friday briefing.
Trump falsely denied that he claimed governors from certain states are asking for equipment they don't need. At Sunday's briefing, Alcindor, Newshour's White House Correspondent, asked the President whether he felt his comments and belief "that some of the equipment that governors are requesting they don't actually need" would have an impact on the federal distribution of ventilators and other medical resources. As Alcindor attempted to finish her question, the President interjected, "I didn't say that," before going on to say it wouldn't have an impact.

--Several rural-state governors alerted President Trump on Monday that they are struggling to obtain urgently needed medical supplies and testing equipment, warning that despite the worsening coronavirus situation in New York and other urban areas, more sparsely populated parts of the country need help, too. 

In response to requests for more testing kits, Mr. Trump said, "I haven't heard about testing in weeks," according to an audio recording of the call between the president and governors obtained by CBS News. 

During the call, which lasted a little over an hour, Democratic and Republican governors detailed how they are struggling to obtain the protective equipment doctors and nurses will need to treat the sick and the test kits needed to determine whether sick residents are suffering from COVID-19.


MARCH 31, 2020

--Almost 80% of Americans on some form of lockdown.

--FEMA announced it “has not actively encouraged or discouraged U.S. companies from exporting [PPE] overseas,” with 280M masks purchased by foreign buyers from US companies in a single day on March 30, despite desperate shortages in the US.

--Trump’s US Agency for International Development is finally stopped from providing PPE to foreign countries after Trump’s coronavirus task force realizes it will look bad when the public finds out what it has been doing.


MARCH 30-APRIL 6, 2020

(From CNN): President Donald Trump has falsely claimed four times since last week that he inherited a faulty coronavirus test -- which was, in reality, developed this year.
In March, Trump initially made a debatable claim that he had inherited a flawed testing "system." By the final days of March and the first days of April, however, he was making a demonstrably inaccurate claim about inheriting the actual tests.

·         "We inherited a broken test -- the whole thing was broken," Trump said on the Fox News morning show "Fox and Friends" on March 30.
·         "And remember this: We inherited -- the word is we inherited bad tests. We really inherited bad tests. These are horrible tests. And it was broken. It was all broken. And we fixed it," Trump said at the White House briefing on April 1.

·         "The original test -- the ones we inherited, Jim, as an example, they were -- they were broken. They were obsolete. They were not good tests. And that's what we got stuck with," he said at the April 3 briefing.

·         "Initially speaking, the tests were old, obsolete, and not really prepared," he said at the April 6 briefing.
·          
Trump's clear suggestion was that the flawed test had been left to him by President Barack Obama's administration.

The faulty initial test for the coronavirus was created during Trump's administration, in early 2020, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since this is a new virus that was first identified this year, the tests couldn't possibly be "old" or "obsolete."

"He is lying. He is lying 100%. He is lying because he is trying to shift blame to others, even if the attempt is totally nonsensical," said Gregg Gonsalves, an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the Yale School of Public Health.
The claim "doesn't make sense because it is false," said Tara Smith, an epidemiology professor at Kent State University. "This a new virus."

Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, called the claim "absurd" given that "this virus did not exist in the prior administration."
Mina added: "The technology used to test for this virus is technology that is routinely used in clinical microbiology laboratories. It is not faulty."

MARCH 2020, Undetermined Date

During one task force meeting in the Situation Room last month, Trump turned to Fauci and challenged him.

It was the day the administration was adding Ireland and the United Kingdom to its travel restrictions, and Trump wanted to understand why talk of “herd immunity” — allowing the coronavirus to sweep a nation largely unchecked, with the belief that those who survived would then be immune — was such a bad idea.

“Why don’t we let this wash over the country?” Trump asked, according to two people familiar with his comments, a question other administration officials say he has raised repeatedly in the Oval Office.

Fauci initially seemed confused by the term “wash over” but became alarmed once he understood what Trump was asking.

“Mr. President, many people would die,” Fauci said.

The president said he understood but since then has repeatedly made clear he wants to reopen things soon — although significant roadblocks remain.

APRIL 1, 2020

--After Trump depleted our strategic stockpile of PPE by donating tons of it to China and other countries around the world, Trump announces he had a call with Putin where he agreed to *purchase* PPE from Russia.


--Trump Administration admits that the national stockpile of PPE is almost completely empty.
washingtonpost.com/national/coron… 

--Thousands of ventilators in the US stockpile found to be broken after Trump Administration allowed the maintenance contract for the ventilators to expire in 2019.


--(From Bloomberg) China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.

The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.

The outbreak began in China’s Hubei province in late 2019, but the country has publicly reported only about 82,000 cases and 3,300 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That compares to more than 189,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths in the U.S., which has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.

APRIL 2, 2020

--FEMA tells House Oversight only 9,500 ventilators are in national stockpile, with only 3,200 more to come in next 2 weeks. The 100,000 ventilators Trump promised will not be available until June, at earliest, after need greatly diminishes.

--Trump Administration admits that strategic PPE reserves are *NOT* being sent to states or to hospitals that need them, but instead are being sent to private companies for sale to the highest bidder.

-- Jared Kushner, senior adviser to the president, prompted controversy when he made a rare public appearance at the April 2 coronavirus task force briefing and commented on the federal stockpile. When asked about states’ needs for supplies, Kushner said the stockpile was “supposed to be our stockpile.” The president’s son-in-law added, “It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.”

--Trump issues another memo purporting to invoke the Defense Production Act, but again fails to issue any orders directing any private entities to do anything. The DPA is still not being used to order the production of ventilators or PPE.

APRIL 3, 2020


--The CDC recommends all Americans wear face coverings in public – after weeks of suggesting otherwise. New York’s mayor warns that D-Day is looming as hospitals struggle to find personal protective equipment, ventilators, beds and staff.

--After Jared Kushner announces that the Strategic National Stockpile is “for us” and not for the states in contradiction of the HHS website, the Trump Administration modifies the HHS website to align it with Kushner’s disinformation.

APRIL 4, 2020

--Since Chinese officials disclosed the outbreak of a mysterious pneumonialike illness to international health officials on New Year’s Eve, at least 430,000 people have arrived in the United States on direct flights from China, including nearly 40,000 in the two months after Trump imposed restrictions on such travel, according to an analysis of data collected in both countries.

The bulk of the passengers, who were of multiple nationalities, arrived in January, at airports in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Newark and Detroit. Thousands of them flew directly from Wuhan, the center of the coronavirus outbreak, as American public health officials were only beginning to assess the risks to the United States.

Flights continued this past week, the data show, with passengers traveling from Beijing to Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, under rules that exempt Americans and some others from the clampdown that took effect on Feb. 2. In all, 279 flights from China have arrived in the United States since then, and screening procedures have been uneven, interviews show.

-- Trump stands at the White House podium and escalates his marketing blitz on behalf of hydroxychloroquine, hyping the old malaria drug’s alleged promise in treating COVID-19, as well as his administration’s success in acquiring huge amounts of it.

APRIL 5, 2020

“A review of federal purchasing contracts by The Associated Press shows federal agencies waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators and other equipment needed by front-line health care workers”

APRIL 7, 2020

It is revealed that Trump has discussed the views of Mehmet Oz favorably, in particular Oz’s advocacy of  anti-Malaria drug hydroxychloroquine.

APRIL 11, 2020

Number of coronavirus deaths in South Korea: 211
Number of Coronavirus deaths in America: 20,294
Both countries had their first confirmed cases on January 20.

APRIL 13, 2020
Trump claims total authority over the states, saying: “The president of the United States calls the shots.” He is challenged by governors, who say he does not have the constitutional right to reopen the country without their involvement.

APRIL 16, 2020

Trump says he's angry he wasn't told there was an epidemic: "And I was angry, because this should have been told to us. It should have been told to us early. It should have been told to us a lot sooner. People knew it was happening and people didn't want to talk about it." (See entry for March 17, 2020.)


APRIL 17, 2020

Two days after thousands of protesters in Michigan gathered to decry their state’s stay-at-home order, Trump tweets to “LIBERATE MINNESOTA”, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA”. Protesters in other states follow suit.

APRIL 23, 2020

After a Homeland Security official presented widely disputed findings on Thursday that sunlight, heat, and humidity can weaken the virus, Trump turned to the official and said: “So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it? And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do, either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re gonna test that too?” At another point in the briefing, he turned to the official: “I see the disinfectant where it knocks [the virus] out [from a surface] in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that [by] injection inside or almost a cleaning?”
Trump will later claim he was being sarcastic.

APRIL 25, 2020

For weeks, nurses and other employees at Veterans Affairs hospitals have said they were working with inadequate protective gear. VA officials denied it.

But in an interview, the physician in charge of the country’s largest health-care system acknowledged the shortage — and said masks and other supplies are being diverted for the national stockpile.

“I had 5 million masks incoming that disappeared,” said Richard Stone, executive in charge of the sprawling Veterans Health Administration. He acknowledged that he’s been forced to move to “austerity levels” at some hospitals.

Stone said the Federal Emergency Management Agency directed vendors with equipment on order from VA to instead send it to FEMA to replenish the government’s rapidly depleting emergency stockpile

APRIL 28, 2020

The number of U.S. coronavirus deaths reaches 58,000. This toll was inflicted over about 8 weeks’ time. It is equal to the death toll the U.S. suffered in Vietnam over a period of 12 years.