United States will likely go down as the country that was supposedly best prepared to fight a pandemic but ended up catastrophically overmatched by the coronavirus, sustaining heavier casualties than any other nation. It did not have to happen this way. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/04/04/coronavirus-government-dysfunction/

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

The failure has echoes of the period leading up to 9/11: Warnings were sounded, including at the highest levels of government, but the president was deaf to them until the enemy had already struck.

Trump administration received its 1st formal notification of the outbreak of the coronavirus in China on Jan. 3. Within days, spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of the threat to Trump by including a warning about coronavirus, first of many, in President’s Daily Brief.

It took 70 days from initial notification for Trump to treat coronavirus not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain, but as a lethal force that was poised to kill tens of thousands. That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was squandered.

Trump’s baseless assertions in those weeks, including his claim that it would all just “miraculously” go away, sowed significant public confusion and contradicted the urgent messages of public health experts.

The most consequential failure involved a breakdown in efforts to develop a diagnostic test that could be mass produced and distributed across the US, enabling agencies to map early outbreaks of the disease, and impose quarantine measure to contain them.

Other failures cascaded through the system. The administration often seemed weeks behind the curve in reacting to the viral spread, closing doors that were already contaminated. Infighting, turf wars and abrupt leadership changes hobbled the work of the coronavirus task force.

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