President Trump was informed in late January of a memo from White House economic adviser Peter Navarro that warned the novel coronavirus could kill up to half a million Americans and cost trillions of dollars, the New York Times reports.
Why it matters: Trump has repeatedly denied seeing January and February memos that Navarro sent, while insisting he did “more or less” what his adviser suggested by banning non-U.S. citizens from traveling from China effective Feb. 2.
- Early missteps allowed COVID-19 to spread throughout the U.S. for weeks before state and local officials took action with strict lockdowns designed to keep the pandemic from spinning further out of control.
What they found: After Trump was presented with a mitigation plan on Feb. 24, “focus would shift to messaging and confident predictions of success rather than publicly calling for a shift to mitigation,” NYT reports.