The Washington Post reports:

This portrait of the precious weeks that President Trump and his administration frittered away in trying to deal with the coronavirus is the result of interviews with 16 current and former administration officials, state health officials and outside experts, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid assessments.

Public health experts and officials faced a deluge of challenges, almost from the beginning. First there were the problems with the initial coronavirus test kits, which contained an unspecified problem with a compound that prompted inconclusive results; it took experts nearly three weeks of troubleshooting to find a workaround. Initial U.S. guidelines for testing also were overly narrow, only screening individuals who presented with respiratory symptoms and had either recently traveled to China or come in close contact with an infected person.

Infighting quickly materialized among agencies that have long had poor relationships — feuding was especially intense between the CDC and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response — and when the situation went awry, recriminations were swift. Public health officials and experts also struggled to find an uneasy equilibrium between doing their jobs honestly and transparently while trying to manage a mercurial president, who griped about what he viewed as overheated rhetoric by officials and the media.

At the White House, Trump and many of his aides were initially skeptical of just how serious the coronavirus threat was, while the president often seemed disinterested as long as the virus was abroad. At first, when he began to engage, he downplayed the threat — “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” he tweeted in late February — and became a font of misinformation and confusion, further muddling his administration’s response.

On Friday, visiting the CDC in Atlanta, the president spewed more falsehoods when he claimed, incorrectly, “Anybody that needs a test, gets a test. They’re there. They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful.”

Public health and infectious disease experts have lamented that the faulty CDC test and limited testing criteria delayed officials’ abilities to detect the virus’s spread throughout the United States. They also said the government expended too much time and too many resources on trying to contain a virus — at 70 times smaller than a single blood cell — that scientists and doctors quickly realized spread easily and stealthily.

The virus was hopscotching around the world in the middle of cold and flu season and presenting with similar symptoms — including a cough and fever — that made it difficult to distinguish from other common ailments without a diagnostic test.

Several experts said the United States should have spent more time making sure hospitals and state and local health departments had the money, training, personal protective equipment and resources they needed to respond to outbreaks. But the White House’s messaging in January and well into late February that the virus was contained and under control probably led health-care facilities to be insufficiently prepared, these experts added.

“They should have been telling every hospital to be prepared to see these cases, knowing how to manage bed space in hospitals if this gets bad and preparing the public for the fact that we’re going to be facing a pandemic rather than saying it’s containable,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security and an infectious disease physician. “The idea of containment requires a lot of public health resources that can be better spent.”

During a late January meeting at the White House, Azar was having trouble focusing Trump’s full attention on his coronavirus briefing. Azar had arrived to brief the president on the latest virus news, but Trump instead interjected, badgering the health chief about the administration’s messy decision to implement a limited ban on flavored e-cigarettes.

Why did you push me to insert myself into a controversial political issue, Trump demanded.

Even as the president remained distracted, signs of the impending virus crisis loomed.

By then, it was already clear that the virus had been spreading in China since early December. Wuhan and several other Chinese cities essentially shut down around Jan. 23, an early sign of just how serious the threat was. [Continue reading…]