Win McNamee/Getty Images U.S. President Donald Trump answers questions in the press briefing room with members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force April 3, 2020 in Washington, DC.

US intelligence officials warned President Donald Trump about the threat of the novel coronavirus in at least a dozen classified briefings in January and February, The Washington Post reported.

The President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, tracked the spread of the virus around the globe for weeks early this year and made clear China was concealing the extent of the outbreak within its borders.

But Trump failed to register the threat.

The president is known to regularly skip reading through the PDB and doesn’t pay much attention even when the information is conveyed to him in oral summaries.

The Post’s is the latest in a series of media reports that show the extent to which officials sounded the alarm about an impending pandemic, which Trump largely ignored until US cases began surging in March.

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US intelligence officials warned President Donald Trump about the threat of the novel coronavirus in at least a dozen classified briefings in January and February, but he ignored the repeated warnings, The Washington Post reported.

Monday’s development adds yet another layer to previous media reports that revealed the extent to which intelligence and administration officials sounded the alarm about an impending pandemic, which the president largely dismissed until US cases began surging in March.

According to The Post, the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, tracked the spread of the coronavirus around the world for weeks in January and February, and made clear that China was concealing the severity of the outbreak within its borders, where it first originated.

But despite the repeated warnings officials conveyed in the PDB, Trump “failed to register” the threat, The Post reported. The president is known to regularly skip reading through the PDB, and he reportedly doesn’t have much patience even when the information is conveyed to him via oral summaries a few times per week.

By the end of January and beginning of February, a majority of the intelligence contained in Trump’s daily briefings was about the coronavirus, The Post reported last month. At the same time that he was getting those briefings, the president was publicly downplaying the risk of the virus.

“The system was blinking red,” one US official with access to the intelligence told The Post. “Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were – they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it.”

Some of the warnings came even earlier. Days before Trump’s inauguration, Obama administration officials briefed Trump officials on how to respond to a pandemic, Politico reported. The hypothetical scenario Obama officials presented to the incoming administration bore many similarities to the coronavirus outbreak.

When asked whether any information from the session made its way to the president-elect, a former senior Trump administration official wasn’t sure but said hypotheticals like that were not “the kind of thing that really interested the president very much.”

Politico also reported that the Trump administration declined to use a nearly 70-page pandemic playbook that the NSC’s health unit put together under the Obama administration. The document instructed federal officials on how to prepare for many of the same obstacles the Trump administration is now facing, including medical equipment shortages and a lack of coordination.

Then, from January to August 2019, the HHS conducted a training simulation about a hypothetical pandemic, caused by a disease that bore striking parallels to the novel coronavirus.

In the simulation, federal agencies fought over who was in charge, state officials and hospitals couldn’t figure out what and how much medical equipment was available, and there was no centralised coordination on state lockdowns and school closings.

The team conducting the simulation put together a draft report laying out the roadblocks they discovered in the exercises, but their warnings went unheeded, according to The New York Times.

The president spent the early weeks of the outbreak insisting there was nothing to worry about, and that warnings about a potential pandemic were a “hoax” meant to hurt his re-election bid and tank the stock market.

He appointed loyalists to head up the White House coronavirus task force and instructed some public health officials not to discuss any more matters related to the virus with the public without prior clearance. The president also has a powerful ally in the right-wing media, which has largely echoed his messaging from the start.

As the number of coronavirus cases in the US began ticking up and the death count increased, Trump acknowledged the problem but assured the public it would go away soon.

The president has also pushed unproven and dangerous theories for how to mitigate the crisis. At a coronavirus briefing last week, for instance, he suggested Americans may inject themselves with household disinfectants to treat the disease. He also floated the idea of using UV light as a treatment.

White House officials decided to significantly scale back the number of daily briefings after the episode, and Trump cut back on taking reporters’ questions.

The World Health Organisation declared the coronavirus, which causes a disease known as COVID-19, a pandemic on Marh 11, and the US is the global epicentre of the outbreak. As of Monday, there are 985,374 confirmed cases of the virus in the country, and 55,906 people have died after testing positive.

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