President Trump chose not to act

President Trump ignored stark warnings from experts pressing for urgent action. In the aftermath of the first diagnosis, public health chiefs Luciana Borio and Scott Gottlieb wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal: 'Act Now to Prevent a Public Health Crisis'. The piece, like many others at the time, said there was still a small window in which action could make a difference. 'If public-health authorities don’t interrupt the spread soon, the virus could infect many thousands more around the globe, disrupt air travel, overwhelm health-care systems, and, worst of all, claim more lives. The good news: There’s still an opening to prevent a grim outcome.'^[3]. But their call to arms fell on deaf ears. A coronavirus task force was created, and yet even this White House committee failed to understand that this was a public health issue. As Grant Hindsley revealed in the New York Times, the group 'typically devoted only five or 10 minutes, often at the end of contentious meetings, to talk about testing, several participants recalled'^[4]. Had Trump taken the virus seriously from the outset, the crisis could have been avoided. Instead the US, 'armed with some of the most highly trained scientists and infectious disease specialists — squandered its best chance of containing the virus’s spread... Americans were left largely blind to the scale of a looming public health catastrophe.'^[4].

[P1] The virus poses a serious threat to public health [P2] The government did not acknowledge the virus as a serious threat [P3] Any serious threat to public health requires political action [P4] No political action was taken at the time of the outbreak