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Unveiling a series of policies meant to mitigate the threat of COVID-19, President Donald Trump also sought to respond to criticism that his administration has been slow to deal with what is now a worldwide pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In particular, the president defended his administration on the issue of insufficient testing resources and what experts say is a looming shortage of medical equipment and personnel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His argument? No one saw this coming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt snuck up on us,\u201d Trump said at a March 18 media briefing. Later, he added that the virus is \u201ca very unforeseen thing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump has repeated that idea often lately. But the claim doesn\u2019t square with the evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Public health researchers have warned for years about the threat of a pandemic. And members of the Trump administration have been sounding the alarm for months now \u2014 even while, just earlier this month, Trump was still comparing the virus\u2019s severity to the flu, and arguing that it \u201cwill go away\u201d if people \u201cstay calm.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We contacted the White House, which declined to comment on the record. Meanwhile, independent experts told us this claim is deeply misleading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Coronavirus Itself<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Both in Washington, D.C., and internationally, health officials had been warning about the dangers posed by COVID-19 since at least January, with some early signals going back to December, when the illness emerged in the Wuhan province of China. Those warnings continued into February, well before the White House began taking serious steps to increase testing and treatment efforts \u2015 a delay that experts said has significantly undermined the national response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, by mid-January, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told the president that the virus \u2014 which had already spread through China \u2015 could pose a threat domestically, too, according to reporting by The New York Times, The Washington Post and Politico.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then, by the end of the month, Azar declared it a \u201cpublic health emergency\u201d in the United States. According to the Times report, Dr. Robert Redfield, who heads the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had also by that point realized \u201cthat it had a great ability to go global.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe alarm was sounded in January,\u201d said Jennifer Kates, a global health expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation. \u201cThis wasn\u2019t a surprise.\u201d (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n At that point, researchers told us, decisive and widespread federal action could have made a big difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But publicly, Trump was still comparing the coronavirus to the flu, downplaying the risk on Twitter and television, and declaring repeatedly that the new virus was under control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Warnings from others continued. On Feb. 25, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, who runs CDC\u2019s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, also highlighted the risk the virus would pose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And of course, the coronavirus warnings didn\u2019t come only from Washington.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Jan. 30, the World Health Organization declared the virus a \u201cPublic Health Emergency of International Concern,\u201d citing its rapid spread since December, when it emerged in China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In doing so, \u201cwe were alerting all countries of a very real threat of international spread,\u201d said Margaret Harris, a WHO spokesperson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By Feb. 24, WHO had told reporters that the virus had a real risk of becoming a global pandemic, and warned that all countries should be prepared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The weeks-long gaps between those warnings and federal efforts to actually test for coronavirus, and to treat it, matter greatly, Kates said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was very visible what was happening and what measures we should be taking,\u201d she told us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Had the White House acted earlier, in particular by stepping up efforts to test for the virus and isolate cases immediately, the virus might not have spread as quickly, global health experts said. The ongoing efforts to \u201csocially distance\u201d even people without symptoms \u2014 which have large economic and health downsides, are less effective and less enforceable, researchers told us \u2015 wouldn\u2019t be as necessary as they are now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDelays of days here matter. When we start throwing away weeks, we really change what\u2019s possible,\u201d said Christopher Mores, a global health professor at George Washington University. \u201cIf we had done a little more of anything, we would find ourselves in a better situation than where we are right now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pandemic Preparedness<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Specialists in public health and national security had been warning for years about a looming pandemic \u2014 and noting that the United States wasn\u2019t adequately prepared for the devastation it could wreak on both citizens\u2019 health and the economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The only details missing were what pandemic and when precisely it would strike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPublic health experts have been shouting that a major pandemic is likely and, in fact, is the greatest security threat we face,\u201d said Lawrence Gostin, a law professor at Georgetown University who studies public health law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As for claims that something like COVID-19 \u201csnuck up on us\u201d or was \u201cvery unforeseen\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt is simply astonishing and simply untrue,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Researchers pointed us to countless reports \u2015 including some by government officials \u2014 that highlighted the threat of a pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In May 2018, researchers at Johns Hopkins University put out a paper warning that respiratory viruses posed a \u201cglobal catastrophic biological risk.\u201d In particular, the researchers warned about RNA viruses \u2015 viruses made up of the traditionally single-stranded ribonucleic acid that also cause illnesses such as the common cold, influenza, hepatitis C and polio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their warning wasn\u2019t off: COVID-19 is indeed a respiratory illness caused by an RNA virus, from the same specific viral family \u2014 that is, the coronavirus family \u2015 as SARS and MERS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then, in October 2018, the World Economic Forum, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted an event to discuss how public and private interests would have to respond in the event of a pandemic. That was only one of many such \u201csimulations\u201d run by health experts concerned about how the U.S. would respond to a looming pandemic threat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cExperts agree that it is only a matter of time before one of these epidemics becomes global \u2014 a pandemic with potentially catastrophic consequences,\u201d read the event description.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And months later, in January 2019 \u2014 more than a year before the president\u2019s advisers sounded the coronavirus alarm \u2015 the topic of a global pandemic emerged again, in a report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support,\u201d reads the report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, the report suggested animal-to-human transmission as a source for the next major pandemic \u2014 which, experts say, is how COVID-19 emerged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And, finally, reporting from Politico shows that, when Trump entered office, members of the Obama administration warned about the threat of a looming viral pandemic \u2015 and noted that, if it occurred, the nation didn\u2019t have the medical resources to handle it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMany people saw this coming, although, of course, it was not known exactly when,\u201d said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Put another way: Experts have been talking about the need for pandemic preparedness, Mores recalled, for at least as long as he has been studying global health. He\u2019s been in the field for 25 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our Ruling<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n President Donald Trump said COVID-19 \u201csnuck up on us,\u201d and was \u201ca very unforeseen thing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, the president heard warnings about this specific virus from his advisers and the global health community for months. And public health and national security experts had been highlighting the risks for even longer about the threat of some kind of pandemic \u2014 even if the details weren\u2019t yet known.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, it is because of Trump\u2019s slow response to the pandemic that \u201csocial distancing\u201d is now required on such a large scale. Earlier, more focused testing and sequestering of people with the virus could have mitigated some of the response now required, experts told us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump\u2019s claim is incorrect and flies in the face of years\u2019 worth of evidence. We rate it Pants on Fire.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n This story was produced by\u00a0Kaiser Health News<\/a>, an editorially independent program of the\u00a0Kaiser Family Foundation<\/a>.<\/em> Unveiling a series of policies meant to mitigate the threat of COVID-19, President Donald Trump also sought to respond to criticism that his administration has been slow to deal with what is now a worldwide pandemic. In particular, the president defended his administration on the issue of insufficient testing resources and what experts say is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":43174,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"newspack_popups_has_disabled_popups":false,"newspack_featured_image_position":"","newspack_post_subtitle":"","newspack_article_summary_title":"Overview:","newspack_article_summary":"","newspack_hide_updated_date":false,"newspack_show_updated_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3570,7],"tags":[18556],"coauthors":[18563],"class_list":["post-43173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health-news","category-news","tag-covid-19-en","entry"],"yoast_head":"\n
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