People queue to enter a tent erected to test for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at the Brooklyn Hospital Center in Brooklyn, New York City, on March 19, 2020. Image Credit: Reuters
Washington: The outbreak of the respiratory virus began in China and was quickly spread around the world by air travellers, who ran high fevers. In the United States, it was first detected in Chicago, and 47 days later the World Health Organisation declared a pandemic. By then it was too late: 110 million Americans were expected to become ill, leading to 7.7 million hospitalised and 586,000 dead.
That scenario, code-named “Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.
The simulation’s sobering results – contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported – drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.
In 2016 the Obama administration produced a comprehensive report on the lessons learned by the government from battling Ebola. In January 2017 outgoing Obama administration officials ran an extensive exercise on responding to a pandemic for incoming senior officials of the Trump administration.
The full story of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus is still playing out. Government officials, health professionals, journalists and historians will spend years looking back on the muddled messages and missed opportunities of the past three months, as President Donald Trump moved from dismissing the coronavirus as a few cases that would soon be “under control” to his revisionist announcement Monday that he had known all along that a pandemic was on the way.
Navy Vet
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