On March 19 the White House started to declare that the COVID-19 pandemic was a complete surprise and sometimes blaming the White House’s lack of action to China covering up the severity of the infection.
Trump said on March 19:
“I would view it as something that just surprised the whole world,”
“Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion.” - Donald Trump
All this administration needed to do was observe what was openly being reported in the public press by mid January. Here is my reply to a tweet back on January 23, nearly 2 months before Trump declaring that everyone was surprised.
Public reporting of the severity of COVID-19
Here are some quotes from the January 23 article:
“China locked down some 20 million people at the epicentre of a deadly virus outbreak on Thursday
“Beijing cancelled massive gatherings that usually attract throngs at temples during the New Year holiday, while the historic Forbidden City will close from Saturday”
“Trains and planes out of Wuhan were indefinitely suspended and tollways on roads out the city were closed, leading to fear and panic for those who were trapped.”
‘“We are feeling as though it is the end of the world," said one Wuhan resident on China's Twitter-like Weibo platform, voicing concerns about shortages of food and disinfectant’
“The first case of the new virus was confirmed on December 31, and it has since been detected in Japan, Hong Kong, Macau, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and the United States. Singapore and Vietnam confirmed their first cases on Thursday.”
By January 23 the scale of the steps China was taking, reported in the public press, was massive. It would have been the equivalent of shutting down all of Texas, blocking all travel to and from Texas, and cancelling all New Years celebrations across the United States.
And the virus was already showing up in a half-dozen other countries.
In fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were actively tracking this outbreak for several weeks before this public article. From The WHO Situation Report, also from January 23, they mention
“WHO assesses the risk of this event to be very high in China, high at the regional level and high at the global level.”
“On 2 January, the incident management system was activated across the three levels of WHO (country office, regional office and headquarters;”
“On 7 January 2020, the US CDC established a 2019-nCoV Incident Management Structure. On 21 January 2020, US CDC activated its Emergency Response System to better provide ongoing support to the 2019-nCoV response.”
And the US Federal Government ran an exercise in 2019 called “Crimson Contagion” that identified key issues in a pandemic. Among the findings was
“The current medical countermeasure supply chain and production capacity cannot meet the demands imposed by nations during a global influenza pandemic.”
So by January 23
WHO and the CDC had been carefully tracking COVID-19 for several weeks.
WHO declared the risk “high” at the “global level”.
China had publicly taken extreme measures across the country.
The United States knew it had a medical supply chain problem.
The alarm bells should have been going off.
By this time the White House should have put this country on a war footing - setting up manufacturing of PPEs, checking the functionality of its existing respirators and ramping up production of new ones, and deploying serious resources to develop high throughput testing to support broad surveillance of the disease.
But for nearly 2 months the White House, GOP, and right-wing media lied, denied, and dithered as the pandemic swept across the globe.
Then, finally, in mid-March the White House acted surprised.
Any effort to shift blame to China “covering up” the numbers is BS and race-baiting by the administration. Everything was known and was public.
“I Don’t take responsibility at all” - Donald Trump, 13 March 2020