- The US is the global epicenter of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
- The story of how the country got here was set in motion years ago, when the Trump administration began weakening the very agencies responsible for handling such an outbreak.
- The result was a beleaguered public health system scrambling to come to grips with a looming crisis, and a disastrous failure to conduct early, rigorous testing.
- The US response was further hobbled by a lack of interagency communication and ineffective leadership from top brass.
- Meanwhile, the president spent the critical early weeks of the crisis downplaying its severity and claiming it was a "hoax" to hurt his reelection chances, even as his own intelligence officials briefed him daily about an impending pandemic.
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On January 20, a 35-year-old man in Washington state who had recently traveled to Wuhan, China, became the first case of the novel coronavirus in the US.
"We have it totally under control," President Donald Trump said in an interview with CNBC two days later. "It's one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It's going to be just fine."
By February 10, the US had recorded 12 confirmed cases, but Trump assured the public that the country was "in great shape" and that the virus would "go away" by April. On February 29, the US announced its first death tied to COVID-19; on March 11, the same day the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, there were 1,000 US cases and 28 deaths.
It's now April, and the US leads the rest of the world in confirmed cases. "China warned Italy," Fred Milgrim, an emergency room physician in Queens, wrote in The Atlantic last week. "Italy warned us. We didn't listen."
