Listening to the WH briefings over the last two days, the portrait of how long the measures to stop the spread will last is growing starker, and longer. With so much focus on NY/NJ, folks lose sight of what happens if it rolls through the rest of the country.

And the basic point that keeps coming up, as captured by @elainaplott recently - there are large numbers of people who wouldn’t believe this was serious until Trump said it in definitive terms, as he did yesterday. The flip side of saying fake news about so much that’s real...

...is that it makes it harder to task subordinates with delivering the bad but also real news. It means having to be the one to stand with a chart projecting hundreds of thousand of deaths because there are many who won’t believe it otherwise.