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Replies to post #17249 on Chesapeake Energy Corp (CHK)
Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump has repeatedly described the coronavirus outbreak in the United States as a problem that nobody anticipated.
The crisis is "an unforeseen problem" that "came out of nowhere," Trump said on March 6. "We're having to fix a problem that, four weeks ago, nobody ever thought would be a problem," he said on March 11. "It's something that nobody expected," he said again on March 14.
Facts First: Trump is just wrong. The US intelligence community, public health experts and officials in Trump's own administration had warned for years that the country was at risk from a pandemic. Some of the warnings specifically mentioned the possibility of a coronavirus pandemic. And when this particular coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was identified in China in early January, health experts quickly cautioned it could be a major problem around the world.
"This was foreseeable, and foreseen, weeks and months ago, and only now is the White House coming out of denial and heading straight into saying it could not have been foreseen," Harvard University epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch, director of Harvard's Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, said on Sunday.
Two months before the novel coronavirus is thought to have begun its deadly advance in Wuhan, China, the Trump administration ended a $200-million pandemic early-warning program aimed at training scientists in China and other countries to detect and respond to such a threat.
The project, launched by the U.S. Agency for International Development in 2009, identified 1,200 viruses that had the potential to erupt into pandemics, including more than 160 novel coronaviruses. The initiative, called PREDICT, also trained and supported staff in 60 foreign laboratories — including the Wuhan lab that identified SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
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