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This story appears in the May 2020 issue of Rolling Stone, on newsstands May 5th.

On February 24th, Dr. Duane Caneva, the chief medical officer at the Department of Homeland Security, sent an urgent email with the subject line “Red Dawn Breaking Bad” to a small group of doctors, epidemiologists, public-health officials, and pandemic experts. For more than a month, the scientists on the email chain had been tracking a deadly new virus that was ripping its way through Southeast Asia.

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The people on the Red Dawn email chain ranged from local health officials in Texas and California to senior-level doctors at the U.S. Army, the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the State Department. Some of them had worked together in the White House in the mid-2000s. They had helped write President Bush’s 2007 national strategic plan for a flu pandemic and had advised President Obama on his response to the 2009 H1N1 outbreak. (The Red Dawn title was an inside joke referring to the 1984 B movie in which the Soviet Union invades America.)

By late February, the sense of alarm in the emails was palpable, as new coronavirus cases were reported in Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, and Italy. One of the White House veterans on the chain was a pandemic expert named Dr. Carter Mecher, who is now a senior adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Mecher got into the habit of waking up at 4:30 a.m. and combing the internet for data to help him understand this new virus and what might happen if it made it to America.

One day, he discovered a field report by Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases about the Diamond Princess cruise ship, docked in Yokohama, which had suffered one of the first major coronavirus outbreaks. Mecher used the field report’s numbers to make a rough projection about how a severe pandemic might play out in the U.S., and he immediately shared it with his colleagues on the Red Dawn chain: By his calculation, if 30 percent of the American population were to get the new coronavirus, more than 1.7 million could die from it.

If those projections were even in the ballpark, a crisis of unimaginable proportions was fast approaching. Dr. Eva Lee, a health care operations expert at Georgia Tech, warned that there would likely be a critical shortage of personal protective equipment for nurses and doctors. Lee wrote, “I do not know if we have enough resources to protect all front-line providers.”

The experts immediately took their warnings to policymakers and officials in Washington, D.C. One public-health specialist, who asked to remain anonymous, says that when he briefed government officials in February, they were stunned to learn how grim the situation was — that it was too late to contain the virus, that mitigation was the only option, and that as many as half of all Americans could become infected from COVID-19. “They looked at me like I was crazy,” the specialist says. “Because no one had told them before.”

By February 28th, the group’s warnings had reached the highest rungs of the Trump administration. One day after he was appointed to the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Dr. Jerome Adams, the surgeon general and chief medical officer for the United States, was added to the Red Dawn chain. A representative for Adams says the surgeon general didn’t see these emails, and in the days afterward, Adams downplayed the coronavirus threat, pointing out that “fried food” and “sitting on your couch” were more likely to lead to your death. But if Adams had read the emails, he would have read Mecher’s most dire warning yet.

Widespread testing problems had prevented experts from seeing the full scope of the crisis, but there was enough data by the end of February, Mecher wrote, to “convince people that this is going to be bad.” National leaders needed to use every tool available — social distancing, school closures, public-gathering bans, and so on — to mitigate the virus’s spread. Cities and states had already begun to prepare, but an outbreak of this magnitude called for nothing less than a nationwide response if we had any hope of stopping a full-blown pandemic.

“We have a relatively narrow window,” Mecher wrote, “and we are flying blind.”