Politics
A timeline of Trump's missed opportunities on coronavirus
David KnowlesEditor
Yahoo NewsApril 8, 2020, 12:32 PM PDT
A timeline of Trump's missed opportunities on coronavirus
David KnowlesEditor
Yahoo NewsApril 8, 2020, 12:32 PM PDT
Trump says he never saw a January WH memo warning of the impact from coronavirus
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As the deadly coronavirus outbreak rapidly spread across America in February and March, President Trump repeatedly asserted that “nobody could have predicted something like this.†But a review of government records shows that repeated warnings were issued to the White House and went unheeded.
U.S. intelligence officials with the National Center for Medical Intelligence issued a report in late November warning that a virus was taking root in China, ABC News reported Wednesday. “Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event,†a source inside the government told ABC, and the report was shared with the White House, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency. It is unclear whether Trump was ever briefed on the NCMI report, but sources who spoke to ABC described multiple briefings about the report throughout December for “policymakers†as well as officials at the National Security Council and the White House.
The first confirmed case in China of what would later be identified as COVID-19, the disease that can result from exposure to the coronavirus, was reported on Dec. 10. By then, U.S. intelligence officials, using intercepted computer data and satellite imagery, had already detected the impact of the virus on daily life in the city of Wuhan and the surrounding area.
On Dec. 31, the Chinese government publicly confirmed that dozens of people in Wuhan were being treated for pneumonia-like symptoms. Three days later, on Jan. 3, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said he first learned of the spread of the virus in China at a White House briefing attended by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield. Again, it is unclear whether Trump was notified at that time.
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