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1) Nothing President Trump today undermines even a single fact in the stories we published over the weekend. The truth remains that the nation's top health advisers concluded as of Feb. 14 that the US needed to use targeted containment efforts to slow the virus spread.....
2) Trump then waited until March 16 to announce his support for these measures.... https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/15-days-slow-spread/
3) Any pandemic expert or epidemiologist can tell you, once you have community spread--documented either with confirmed infections or the first death--you must move immediately to implement these so called Non Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPI), such as school/business closures.
3) If you wait a week, more people will get sick. More will die. Two weeks, it is like waiting until the fire that started in the kitchen is burning through the roof and structure of the house--and then you call the firefighters. Too late.
4) And while yes, it is up to the governors to make these decisions, they look to the White House for leadership--as do pandemic experts who were privately sharing their frustration on March 11 after President Trump put limits on flights from Europe, instead of calling for NPIs.
Local officials--like this one from Texas--wanted help to make the move to NPIs. Doing so is very difficult. As many in the public will challenge it as an overreaction--as it has to happen BEFORE you have a lot of deaths, or it is too late. Again, the feds can/must play a role.
5) That is what we examined in our piece. The slow move from efforts to "contain" the virus to the next stage: to "mitigate" it, with NPIs. You can read a larger collection of the emails that backed up the piece here https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/us/politics/coronavirus-red-dawn-emails-trump.html
6) And you can read our in-depth examination of the warnings given to @realDonaldTrump and the White House about the virus, and the failure to heed them as weeks passed. @shearm @maggieNYT @SangerNYT @MarkMazzettiNYT @julianbarnes https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-response.html
7) It all still stands: what we have before us is a public policy failure that helps explain what has happened in NYC in recent weeks, as well as Michigan, Louisiana, Conn, NJ, among other locations late to move to NPIs/mitigation. Those are the facts.
