Donald Trump did nothing!

Axios reporting about advance warning predicting this pandemic and its dire consequences.

Warning of about mass death circulated in the West Wing in January, 2020.

In late January, Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro warned his White House colleagues about how the coronavirus could take more than half a million American lives and cost close to $6 trillion, according to memos obtained by Axios' Jonathan Swan and Margaret Talev. By late February, Navarro was even more alarmed, and he warned his colleagues, in another memo, that up to 2 million Americans could die of the virus.

Navarro's grim estimates are set out in two memos — one dated Jan. 29 and addressed to the National Security Council (NSC), the other dated Feb. 23 and addressed to President Trump. 

In fact, the NSC circulated both memos around the White House and multiple agencies.

In the first memo, Navarro makes his case for "an immediate travel ban on China."

The second lays the groundwork for supplemental requests from Congress, with the warning: "This is NOT a time for penny-pinching or horse trading on the Hill."

Why it matters: The memos reveal detailed health and economic calculations meant to grab and hold the president's attention, when there was time to prepare American citizens and officials.

The president quickly restricted travel from China, moved to delay re-entry of American travelers who could be infected and dispatched his team to work with Congress on stimulus funds.
But Trump was far slower to publicly acknowledge the sort of scenarios Navarro had put in writing.

One senior administration official who received Navarro's memos said that at the time, they were skeptical of his motives and thus his warnings: "The January travel memo struck me as an alarmist attempt to bring attention to Peter’s anti-China agenda while presenting an artificially limited range of policy options."
"The supplemental memo lacked any basis for its projections, which led some staff to worry that it could needlessly rattle markets and may not direct funding where it was truly needed."

The Feb. 23 memo began: "There is an increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1-2 million souls."

Navarro called for an "immediate supplemental appropriation of at least $3 billion" to support efforts at prevention, treatment, inoculation and diagnostics.

He described expected needs for "Personal Protective Equipment" for health care workers and secondary workers in facilities such as elder care and skilled nursing.

#Impotus

He estimates that over a four-to-six month period, "We can expect to need at least a billion face masks, 200,000 Tyvek suits, and 11,000 ventilator circuits, and 25,000 PAPRs (powered air-purifying respirators)."

Flashback: "It's going to have a very good ending for us," Trump said of the coronavirus in a speech on Jan. 30.

In a Feb. 24 tweet, he said it was "very much under control" and that the stock market is "starting to look very good to me."

The World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11.
On March 17, the president said: "I've felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic."