This thread. My God.

None of this was inevitable. Americans are dying from an avoidable leadership failure of massive proportions. https://twitter.com/EricLiptonNYT/status/1249012275681337345

What these emails make so, so, so, so, SO, SO, SO enragingly clear is that experts inside the government saw which way this outbreak was going.

They understood the risk, and saw what needed to be done. But they were not heeded.

This was a failure of politics, not expertise.

It is almost physically painful to read these messages.

It's all here. The frightening fatality rate. The need to scale up testing. The likelihood of supply chain disruption. The need to prepare for social distancing. The fragility of the hospital system.

"The health system burden cannot be overemphasized. Just think about 1% infection in Georgia, out of that 20% requires medical attention. That is over 18,000 people. Can we handle these extra people in the hospitals?"

"We should treat this as the next pandemic for now, and we can always scale back if the outbreak dissipates, or is not as severe...."

"What has me worried is what happened on the cruise ship is a preview of what will happen when the virus makes its way to the US health care system (not to mention institutionalized high-risk populations...). I'm not sure that folks understand what is just over the horizon."

As someone out of government, my own email chains in February were very similar, with one difference: we wondered how on earth the USG was reading this so differently.

Now it's clear - they weren't. They were hearing the same things, but it wasn't translating into action.

We are now in a situation where our BEST CASE outcome is that tens of thousands of American will die needlessly because these experts were ignored. BEST CASE.

Be angry.