As the United States surpasses the coronavirus death toll of any country in the world with more than 22,000 dead, we look how President Trump led the country to this point with Eric Lipton, lead author of The New York Times’s explosive new exposé, “He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus.”
I think you need to go back way before January of 2020, and you go back to — way back to 2006, believe it or not, and you go back to the Bush administration, when it was during the Bush administration, of George W. Bush, that there were key advisers to President Bush who realized that it was only a matter of time before a significant infectious disease came to the United States, like it happened, you know, shortly after World War I, and it was going to cause widespread illnesses and deaths, and that the United States was not properly prepared for it. And so, it was in 2006 that the United States designed a comprehensive pandemic plan, which has two essential stages, and the stages are containment and mitigation.
And the first stage is containment, in which you attempt to — essentially, like the word sounds, you attempt to contain the infection and prevent it from spreading. And you do that by preventing people who are ill from coming to the United States with it, you know, or if someone is ill, you do what’s called contact tracing, in which you identify anyone that’s had contact with
— source democracynow.org | Apr 13, 2020