As the coronavirus crisis has escalated, Donald Trump has attempted to cast the public health emergency as an “unforeseen” problem for which it was impossible to prepare. But even some within the administration seem to have seen the pandemic coming. White House economists cautioned in a report last fall that a pandemic like the one that has since gripped the world could exact an enormous human toll in the United States and take a wrecking ball to the nation’s economy, according to the New York Times. Unfortunately, the warning fell on deaf ears.

In analyzing how a pandemic akin to the 1918 Spanish flu could impact the U.S., White House economists predicted that a disease even less contagious and deadly than coronavirus appears to be could kill 500,000 Americans and damage the economy to the tune of $3.8 trillion. With that in mind, the authors of the September study urged the administration to take action to prepare for such a scenario, including by ramping up federal efforts to “speed up the time it takes to develop and deploy new vaccines.”

But the administration didn’t act decisively, even as the virus ravaged China, Italy, and other countries, and began to spread in the U.S. “I don’t think corona is as big a threat as people make it out to be,” Tomas Philipson, acting chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, told reporters in February, likening the virus to the seasonal flu and suggesting such a public health threat would have little economic impact.

Maddeningly, the economists specifically discouraged this very comparison, which has also been made repeatedly by Trump himself. “People may conflate the high expected costs of pandemic flu with the far more common, lower-cost seasonal flu,” the authors wrote. “It is not surprising that people might underappreciate the economic and health risks posed by pandemic flu and not invest in ways to reduce these risks.”

Trump certainly didn’t invest in ways to reduce the risks. Not only did he dismantle the pandemic response teams that could’ve been utilized now, but he spent months minimizing the threat of coronavirus—even as it began to spread in America. “We have it very much under control in this country,” he claimed in February. But as the threat grew into a full-fledged crisis, killing thousands of Americans and paralyzing the nation, he began casting it as an emergency that appeared out of the blue, that nobody could have predicted. “It’s an unforeseen problem,” he said last month. “What a problem. Came out of nowhere.”

That it obviously didn’t, and that so many warnings were missed, is one of the most infuriating aspects of Trump’s bungled handling of the pandemic. Before the president took office, Obama administration officials briefed their successors on the possibility of a pandemic—but Trump and his incoming administration brushed off the exercise, with one Cabinet official, Wilbur Ross, reportedly dozing off at points during the briefing. (In January, Ross suggested coronavirus could be good for the U.S. economy). Moreover, Trump has reportedly ignored a step-by-step guide from the Obama administration detailing how to fight a pandemic. Even when U.S. intelligence officials directly warned Trump in January and February that a pandemic was likely, he failed to act—all the while playing down the threat the virus posed to Americans.

Trump can’t be faulted for a pandemic. But how might things have been different had he not brushed off the warnings? It’s hard to say—though the president himself hazarded a guess last month. “If people would have known about it, it could have stopped,” he said. “It’s too bad.”

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