Why didn't I see the Covid-19 catastrophe coming?

Reflections on cognitive bias, punditry, and accountability

Colonel Tharp is on his way

I just spoke to LtCol Tharp. It’s bedtime in his timezone, but he tells me he’s on top of things. That said, since he tells me he works best under pressure, here’s a motivational message for him:

Be seated.

If you don’t reply by tomorrow, Tharp, you will lose by default. Losing is intolerable to a United States Marine. 

All this stuff you hear about Marines not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the debate, is a lot of bullshit. Americans love to debate. All real Americans love the sting and clash of debate. When you were a kid, you admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league ball players and the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans. Debate is the most significant competition in which a man can indulge. It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base.

People who debate me aren’t all going to die. Only two percent of you right here today would be killed in a major debate with Claire Berlinski. Every man is scared in his first debate with Claire. If he says he’s not, he’s a goddamn liar. But the real hero is the man who debates even though he’s scared. Some men will get over their fright in a minute under fire, some take an hour, and for some it takes days. But the real man never lets his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood.

Then there’s one thing you’ll be able to say when this quarantine is over and you get let out of your home. Thirty years from now when you’re sitting by your fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks, ‘What did you do in the Great Pandemic?’’ You won’t have to cough and say, “Well, your granddaddy served in combat in the Balkans, East Africa, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and he deployed with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit on the USS Bataan, and he flew Hornet jets, and he planned special forces operations on three continents.” No sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say “Son, your granddaddy tried to defend the performance of the Trump Administration in an online debate with Claire Berlinski!” 

That is all. 

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That number is now 30,076. By the time I hit “send,” it will be higher.

Reader James Williams sent me this article by Scott Alexander. It’s a set of reflections about why some pundits got it right and others didn’t:

… Predicting the coronavirus was [extremely] hard, and the best institutions we had missed it. … The stock market is a giant coordinated attempt to predict the economy, and it reached an all-time high on February 12, suggesting that analysts expected the economy to do great over the following few months. On February 20th it fell in a way that suggested a mild inconvenience to the economy, but it didn’t really start plummeting until mid-March—the same time the media finally got a clue. These aren’t empty suits on cable TV with no skin in the game. These are the best predictive institutions we have, and they got it wrong. I conclude that predicting the scale of coronavirus in mid-February—the time when we could have done something about it—was really hard.

I don’t like this conclusion. But I have to ask myself – if it was so easy, why didn’t I do it? …

[The media’s] main excuse is that they were just relaying expert opinion—the sort of things the WHO and CDC and top epidemiologists were saying. I believe them. People on Twitter howl and gnash their teeth at this, asking why the press didn’t fact-check or challenge those experts. But I’m not sure I want to institute a custom of journalists challenging experts.

I liked this article, but he and I disagree about a few things.

First—no. If you’d been paying attention to the WHO and the CDC, you’d have been in an outright panic by February 12. I discussed the WHO’s sitreps in the previous newsletter. The CDC was saying the same thing, well before February 12.

On January 23, the CDC published “Coronavirus Infections—More Than Just the Common Cold.” Read it—you’ll see it was all there. I don’t know which journalists are excusing their failure by saying the CDC didn’t give them a heads-up, but how are they keeping a straight face? Not only did they fail to check the CDC’s website in January, they didn’t even check it before making this excuse.

Second, journalists do need to challenge experts, especially the WHO and CDC—or at least, check their work. The WHO didn’t get Covid-19 all that wrong. Not, at least, to a degree that would explain our failure. But one reason I got this wrong is that the WHO has been wrong before.

During the Ebola epidemic, I did exactly what I failed to do this time. Every day, I looked carefully at the WHO’s sitreps, read them closely, considered their implications, and counted to see if they were doing their math right. To my surprise, I saw that they were not. I concluded they were exaggerating the gravity of the threat, probably because they feared the numbers would become right if we didn’t take action quickly. This phenomenon is well-known to anyone honest—note that qualification—who works in public health. Elizabeth Pisani calls it “beating up the numbers.” (Great book, by the way.)

Finally, I think Alexander misunderstands what happened to the economy.

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Alexander mentions Zeynep Tüfekçi, who got it right, he suggests, because she’s a bit neurotic. (Actually, no—she got it right because she’s very smart.)

It Wasn’t Just Trump Who Got It Wrong, Tüfekçi writes:

… from the end of January through most of February, a soothing message got widespread traction, not just with Donald Trump and his audience, but among traditional media in the United States, which exhorted us to worry about the flu instead, and warned us against overreaction. It seemed sensible, grown-up, and responsible. “Get a Grippe, America,” read the headline of one piece that made fun of those worried about this pandemic with a play on grippe (French for “flu,” how clever.) The title said that the flu was a much bigger threat “for now.” There was a New York Times op-ed with a nice alliteration, telling us to “Beware of the Pandemic Panic,” again comparing the coronavirus to the flu, and warning us that overreaction would be worse than the pandemic. (The author wrote a follow-up admitting he was wrong, but claiming that this was a “black swan” event, something unpredictable, rather than what it was: predictable and predicted, a gray rhino). Another New York Times op-ed, on February 5, provocatively titled “Who Says It’s Not Safe to Travel to China?” and written by a tourism-industry reporter, claimed travel bans were unjust and ineffective, and were racist especially because they weren’t issued for flu—and, astonishingly, went on to reassure readers that most coronavirus victims recovered.

How does Tüfekçi explain this? I’ll simplify her argument, but basically, she makes a compelling case that journalists are stupid. And she’s right. They were either too stupid to understand what they were reading, or, like me, paying no attention at all.

Why wasn’t I?

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There was no shortage of warnings. It was well understood. It would probably be a respiratory virus, and it would spread around the world with unprecedented speed— for the obvious reason that an unprecedented number of humans now travel around the world at unprecedented speeds.

I can forgive myself for not realizing this before 1990. First, the implications of globalization were only beginning to dawn on us. Thomas Friedman didn’t even write that book about the car and the nice olive grove until about 2000. Also, adolescents are lousy at evaluating risk. My neuroanatomy was working against me.

But more importantly, my extraordinary good luck was working against me.

I was born in 1968 and promptly vaccinated against diphtheria, polio, pertussis, tetanus, measles, rubella, rabies, and mumps. Most of these vaccines had been developed in the two decades prior. I wasn’t even vaccinated against smallpox: We’d eradicated it.

Mine was the first generation in history to grow up like this, and there would only be two generations like mine. We were absolutely free from fear of epidemic disease. We even managed to produce such specimens as “anti-vaxxers.” Imagine how spoiled, pampered, and distant from nature one would have to be to worry that vaccines—well-tested ones, at that!—will do your child more harm than good! That’s my generation. I suspect growing up that way made me much more blithe about infectious disease than anyone before me in history could have been.

My mother’s generation grew up with polio. Polio crippled Itzhak. From my mother’s voice, I understood that I was one lucky kid to live in a world without polio. But I grew up thinking of polio—and all those other diseases—as phenomena like the Holocaust: recent enough that everyone’s grandparents died that way, but also, distinctly, the past. The sort of thing that happened to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s sister, or on small TV screens, to people who moved in the strange, jerky way people used to move.

Or perhaps it happened to the children whom you could choose to save or turn the page. But it had nothing to do with our era, our country. We lived in America, the land of the free and the brave, and damned right we were brave because nothing like the Nazis, or an epidemic disease, was ever going to touch us here. I grew up in the modern, peaceful, developed USA—where we put men on the moon and pitied the Chinese—and things like pandemics did not happen, and I was one lucky kid.

By 1989, the Berlin Wall had fallen—an event that did little to put me in contact with the Reality Principle.

I should have noticed a flaw in my general thesis—“Every day, in every way, life is getting better and better”—when (enter stage left) HIV showed up. But to the contrary, when the predicted heterosexually-transmitted AIDS epidemic failed to occur, I drew a different lesson. I drew it unconsciously, to be sure—I’m only now thinking it through and realizing this—but the lesson stuck with me all the same: “These warnings are crap. They’re made by people with an agenda. People just love to get hysterical and tell you what to do.” These aren’t bad lessons to have learned, overall—they’re good, actually—but they’re surpassingly dangerous when unexamined, unconscious, and incorrectly applied.

So until 1990, say, owing to neurological immaturity and a blessedly lucky American childhood, I can be forgiven for thinking, “Pandemic disease is not at the top of my list of worries.”

But by 1990, I was an educated adult. HIV might not have killed me, but it killed off a significant part of San Francisco, one of the cities in which I grew up. My brain was developed enough, neurologically, to grasp the basic point: “There are a great many ways things can go sideways.”

I just never paid much attention to the dozens upon dozens of articles, books, government investigations, congressional reports, preparedness reviews, or even the TED talks that warned both that a pandemic was inevitable and that the United States wasn’t remotely prepared for it. No excuse for it, really. Just laziness.

So when WHO and the CDC—and, actually, many journalists—began warning that this was no mere flu virus; this could be the Big One, I defaulted to a serious of lazy, unexamined, and largely unconscious assumptions:

1. “It can’t happen here. This is the First World.”

2. “They’re all hysterics. Another hysteria brought to you by people who think the words “Nice legs” are the cause of “lasting trauma” in women. I’m not reading any more of this histrionic clickbait.”

3. “The WHO always exaggerates. Remember Ebola? Fumento was right about that.”

That is why I missed this. That is why I didn’t see this coming. Those were the cognitive blinders, and man, did they blind me.

Meanwhile, I knew very well that we were no longer “the First World”—and this in a very meaningful sense. I’d just written explicitly about our rapid loss of the fundamental competencies of developed countries and prophesied our impending doom as a consequence. I was quite right—and believe me, I’m still right. If you think the Administration that managed our response to this pandemic is any more conscientious about nuclear weapons, you’re gravely mistaken. They are not.

That I didn’t see this coming in the form of a disease was a failure of imagination owed to a blessedly healthy childhood. That I saw something like it coming was unfortunately not just a lucky accident.

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So that’s why I wasn’t paying attention, and didn’t, until people in Italy began dying in numbers no one could ignore—except for Americans. (That, I will never understand.) There’s my defense: I was lazy and entitled.

But the case that predicting the coronavirus was too hard—and this explains why neither Scott Alexander, our elected officials, nor I predicted it—collapses on contact with East Asia. It wasn’t too hard for officials in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Singapore. It wasn’t too hard for Germany, either.

Even if we grant—which we should not—that it was too hard in January, this doesn’t explain why we failed to act competently in February and March, or why we’re still incompetent in April.

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Yesterday morning, I received a newsletter from The Dispatch:

As of Thursday night, there are now 671,151 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States (a 5.2 percent increase from yesterday) and 33,268 deaths (a 7.9 percent increase from yesterday), according to the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, leading to a mortality rate among confirmed cases of 5 percent (the true mortality rate is difficult to calculate due to incomplete testing regimens).

It is April 18, and we still haven’t managed to test a weighted sample of our population to see if they’ve been exposed to SARS-CoV-2. We’ve only just begun rolling out those serological tests.

It’s worse: We haven’t even done a study to see what percentage of Americans, in a weighted sample, are suffering, right now, from Covid-19.

German scientists produced their first diagnostic test on January 17.

As of now, as the Dispatch points out, we can’t calculate the true mortality rate, because no one in the United States has done the most obvious of tasks—checked to see how many Americans have this disease in the first place.

If these results (in German) are anything to go by, we’re in a world of hurt. Those are the results of exactly such a study, conducted last week in Austria—the kind of study that allows you to answer the question, “What is the true mortality rate of Covid-19?” That is to say, what percentage of your population has this disease?

Only if you know that can you begin to say what the death rate from the disease might be. That’s a critically important question if you’re trying to determine the relative costs and benefits of permitting various social, educational, and industry sectors to re-open.

The results of the Austrian study—and its implications—are awful. Say goodbye to the fantasy that we’ve all had it already and the virus is vastly less lethal than it seems. SORA tested a demographically-weighted sample of 1,544 Austrians. The prevalence of COVID-19 in a given Austrian household, they concluded, was between 0.12 percent and 0.76 percent with a 95 percent confidence interval.

This is not evidence that the mortality rate now seen in New York—five percent—is the true mortality rate. But it sure doesn’t say, “Let ‘er rip, this thing’s harmless!”

That we’ve not yet conducted similar tests is astonishing.

Ohio has plans to do so. I have not made up the following words:

During Saturday’s daily COVID-19 briefing, Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Amy Acton announced a team will be made up of amateur epidemiologists, equipped with technology, to take on the effort. They’ll start with a random sample of 100 asymptomatic people.

“We’re trying to get a better sense of who’s out there, what’s going on in the general population,” she said.

Acton didn’t say exactly when that work would start or be completed.

Do you realize how crazy this is? How insane it is to be talking about a “opening America up again” before we’ve conducted any kind of sample—not by “amateurs” but by “professional epidemiologists,” equipped not with “technology” but with “serological enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays that have been developed from recombinant antigens derived from the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2,” not of “a random sample of 100 people” but “a properly-weighted sample of 9,600 Americans, as well as similar samples in every state and samples from the higher risk cohorts in particular,” and then confirmed these results—twice—on dates we can state decisively?

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

Major News Conference tonight, the White House at 6:00 P.M. (Eastern), to explain Guidelines for OPENING UP AMERICA AGAIN!

This is fantasy. (“Major News Conference tonight, the White House at 6:00 P.M., to explain Guidelines for Casting the ALOHOMORA SPELL!”)

If this disease kills five percent of the Americans it infects, or anything like that, we can’t open a goddamned thing. Or we could, but if Americans start to die in numbers like that, good luck persuading them to go forth and populate the Home Depots and the Cheesecake Factories. They will not go outside if they realize there’s a one in twenty chance the excursion will kill them—and yes, they will realize it. You can’t hide that many bodies. We can’t, at this point, rule that scenario out, nor even say, “It doesn’t seem likely,” based on the available evidence.

It would actually make sense if we discovered the per capita death toll in America was higher than that of other countries. The reason would be obvious. The key co-morbidities, apart from age, are overweight and obesity. Forty percent of the American public is obese. Another 31.8 percent is overweight. And more than a third—36 percent—of our population is over sixty.

We have a rational basis to worry that if a hundred Americans are infected by SARS-CoV-2, five of them will die from it. It’s a worst-case scenario, but there’s enough evidence for it that right now, no amount of money could persuade me to go to a crowded Olive Garden in upstate New York.

“Open the economy! I command you!”

Yeah, right.

Nor have we any reason to think the survivors will be just fine. To the contrary. It seems a significant number will be permanently disabled, with injuries ranging from pulmonary damage to brain damage.

If you’re American and you’re reading this, you’re more likely than not to be in the cohort classified, by some of my readers, as “old and sick people who don’t contribute to the economy anyway.”

You are the ones they’re talking about when they say, “Why don’t we just quarantine the at-risk people?” Translation: Why don’t we just put you folks in some kind of “facility?” Because that’s the only way to keep you from catching it from young people. Like the sound of that? No medical care in there, either. Not that you’d need it, of course—you’re 65-years-young, and age is just a number, I know—but for actuarial purposes, it’s not. If we pursue such a strategy, the only people you’ll ever interact with again are other people who live in your “facility.”

Might you, or someone you love, be one of those people who pats his belly regretfully and says, “I could probably stand to lose a few?” Newsflash: You are who they’re talking about when they say, “They would have died anyway.” Yes, you.

Look: This may have been hard to predict in January, but if you haven’t put two and two together by now, you really can’t blame China—or your childhood.

Blaming China

Yesterday, I argued that if we fully accept the excuse that our policy was dilatory only because China was deceptive, it would have put us behind schedule by six days. This cannot possibly explain this:

February 10, New Hampshire

February 19, Arizona

February 20, Colorado

February 21, Nevada 

February 28, South Carolina.

Those are the dates of Trump rallies—otherwise known as “global hotspots of emerging zoonotic disease,” and veritable death sentences for the comorbid.

Why did Trump do this to people he supposedly loves? Let’s assume he was indeed confounded by initial reports from China, echoed by the WHO, that the disease couldn’t be transmitted from human to human, or by subsequent assurances by China that they had the problem firmly under control.

This does seem to be what he was thinking, at least, on January 24.

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!

China—and yes, the WHO—are at the center of this catastrophe. But why did a president who made “toughness on China” the centerpiece of his electoral campaign trust China? Forget the classified briefings: The measures our Asian allies were taking in January were in the open. Clearly, they did not trust China. Why did he?

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China Lies. Objects unsupported fall toward the earth.

Some have suggested that the reason these countries responded with such alacrity and stringency was that all of them had experienced SARS-CoV-1.

We had the same experience.

By April 4, 2003, 115 Americans, in 29 states, were diagnosed with SARS. We actually had more experience with SARS than South Korea.

China lied about that, too. Health authorities in Guangdong province knew of the outbreak of a new respiratory illness in mid-November of 2002, but for months, the CCP bottled up the flow of information. It wasn’t until April 2003 that Chinese state media began reporting on the outbreak. It heavily under-reported the numbers.

You did not need the NSA or any of our 17 (or is it 117?) intelligence agencies to judge China an unreliable interlocutor. Just, say, a subscription to Time magazine.

A physician at Beijing's Chinese People's Liberation Army General Hospital (No. 301) in a signed statement provided to TIME, says that at one Beijing hospital alone, 60 SARS patients have been admitted of whom seven have died. That indicates the number of patients infected with SARS in Beijing may be significantly higher than those totals made public by China’s Ministry of Health. 

And you you don’t even need Google Translate to read this:

By early April, it was evident that SARS was being taken very seriously at the top level. Yet the [Chinese] government’s ability to formulate a sound policy against SARS was hampered as lower-level government officials intercepted and distorted the upward information flow. For fear that any mishap reported in their jurisdiction might be used as an excuse to pass them over for promotion, government officials at all levels tended to distort the information they pass up to their political masters in order to place themselves in a good light.

Does that sound familiar? It should—especially to any student of the Great Famine. That’s exactly how 45 million people starved to death, and not so long ago, either.

It seems Trump genuinely was the only person in the world who was taken in by China’s assurances. That’s the charitable explanation. That’s the explanation his campaign is stressing, and the one to which he insistently repairs.

Because there’s no other possible explanation, except these:

1) He paid no attention at all to the President’s Daily Briefing on January 3, and paid no attention at all on throughout January as cases were confirmed outside of China, country by country. He continued to pay no attention as the virus took hold then exploded throughout the United States;

2) He knew China was lying, but truly didn’t give a damn how many Americans died;

3) He believes in magic.

I suspect it’s the first—certainly the case with my own failure, up until March—yet he keeps insisting it’s because China lied. Ergo, he trusted China.

Accept, for the sake of argument, that those six days made all the difference. How did he understand what Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, and South Korea had been doing since early January?

Why did Trump say this on January 24, well after cases had been confirmed not only throughout Asia, but in the United States?

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!

I’d have much more confidence if he just admitted he wasn’t paying attention. I mean, if he really trusted China, what else has he done? Handed them the password to his Gmail account? To the nuclear football?

Seriously, what else has he done?

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A simple heuristic for understanding China

I have a friend who—unlike me, and unlike the President—did see it coming. When he began warning us to take this virus in Wuhan seriously, I shrugged and figured he was a hysterical germaphobe.

For personal reasons, this friend has spent a great deal of time in China. He is a great friend of the Chinese people.

Recently, I commended him for his prescience. I asked him why he’d seen it coming even as I was wasting time worrying about my skincare regime.

“I use a simple heuristic,” he replied. “If the CCP says something, the opposite is true.”

If I’d been paying attention to what China was saying—I was not—I would have used the same heuristic. It is the standard anyone reasonable would apply.

The bungling and authoritarianism of the Chinese Communist Party is at the center of this catastrophe, but truly, this barely rates among its crimes. This one’s a bagatelle compared to the Great Famine or the Cultural Revolution or the One-Child Policy.

Consider the absurdity of what you’re being asked to believe. The American president failed to protect us—and now 31,000 Americans are dead—because he was duped by China.

Of course China was lying. The Zhongnanhai lies. This is a known fact of the universe, like “objects unsupported fall toward the earth.” The Zhongnanhai claims it is not holding as many as a million ethnic minorities and political prisoners in slave labor camps visible from space. The Zhongnanhai claims Taiwan is its sovereign territory. The Zhongnanhai claims Tibet has always been part of China and has become a “Shangri-La for human rights.” The Zhongnanhai claims that peaceful protesters in Hong Kong are terrorists. The Zhongnanhai claims this airsoft gun is a US-supplied M320 grenade launcher. The Zhongnanhai claims it does not harvest the organs of Falun Gong practitioners. The Zhongnanhai claims nothing of special interest happened on June 3, 1989, at Tiananmen Square.

The CCP has a long, storied history of concealing the deaths of its citizens from starvation and epidemic disease. It concealed critical information about China’s AIDS epidemic, just as it concealed critical information about its SARS epidemic, and in both cases, the CCP’s reaction was first to deny any problem at all, then to isolate the affected areas, then to let the infected die. Anyone who trusted China to be transparent about this was a fool; so is anyone who believes it is racist to make these observations, and it is hard to decide which form of foolishness is more nauseating.

The argument now emerging from the Trump Administration—that Trump failed to respond in a timely fashion because China was dishonest—does nothing to exonerate the Administration. To the contrary. If it is true, it is even more shameful than my excuse—hey, I just wasn’t paying attention.

Taiwan’s Central Epidemic Command Center (do note that it has one) issued this public bulletin on January 21:

As the number of cases in Wuhan is increasing rapidly, a leading infectious disease expert in china have strongly advised travelers against visiting Wuhan. On January 21, WHO furthen [sic] pointed out that the 2019-nCoV might have sustained human-to-human transmission. As the first imported case from Wuhan has been confirmed in Taiwan, CECC announced raising the travel notice level for Wuhan to Level 3: Warning, reminding the public to avoid all non-essential travels to Wuhan.

As the pneumonia outbreak caused by 2019-nCoV in China has obviously resulted in community transmission and spread, CECC will continue to integrate resources across government agencies, reinforce implementation of quarantine measures at international including cross-strait airports and ports, reinforce risk communication with the public and public awareness about the disease, ensure the preparation of pharmaceutical and medical supplies, to prevent the occurrence of fake news concerning mask shortages and price gouging and reduce public panic, and plan and conduct drills for hospital infection control at healthcare facilities in order to minimize the impact of the outbreak on Taiwan, tackle the threats and challenges posed by the outbreak, and ensure the health of the Taiwanese public.

Perhaps it was merely a mistake in English grammar, but I suspect they meant just what they said: Taiwan relied on “a leading infectious disease expert in China,” not “The CCP.” 

Within days, Taiwanese officials cut off travel from Wuhan and begin tracking cellphones to make sure quarantined people stayed at home.

They did not believe China.

By mid-January, German researchers had developed a test for the virus and deployed it to German hospitals around the country. (France did not, and still has not, and does not anticipate having the capacity to do so until May 11.)

They did not believe China.

On January 23, Singapore scaled up its emergency plans. It began aggressive contact tracing, quarantining anyone who had been close contact with someone infected, and restricting entry to people who had traveled to China. 

Note: “People who had traveled to China,” not “Chinese nationals.” There is an important difference. The first measure contains disease; the second does not. 

They did not believe China.

The travel ban that wasn’t

We’re the ones that gave the great response, and we’re the ones that kept China out of here. ... If I didn’t do that early call on China — and nobody wanted that to happen. Everybody thought it was just unnecessary to do it.

—The President of the once-United States

A lie.

On January 31, the Trump Administration claimed it would restrict entry to “foreign nationals who had been in China in the last 14 days.”

But it did not.

This policy went into effect on February 4—after Delta, American and United had already cancelled all their flights from the mainland; after the pilots’ union for American sued to halt the flights; after the pilot’s union advised members to refuse the fly the route; after the Association of Flight Attendants begged the federal government to stop the flights; after Air France, British Airways and Scandinavian Airlines suspended their flights from China; and after career public health officials at HHS begged him to do it.

It also came after the virus broke out in the United States—in other words, too damned late.

But that’s not all. It never happened. Flights from China continued to land in the US! More than a month after Singapore restricted entry to people arriving from China, Air China 777 arrived at JFK from Beijing as scheduled—as did so many other flights that 40,000 people have managed since then to fly from China to the United States.

The planes never stopped landing. Trump’s assertion that he “banned” travel from China is strictly false.

Would a real travel ban have worked? It’s hard to say. A long list of nations in fact banned all incoming travelers from China—that is, they did what Trump claims to have done—well before Trump’s announcement. Some have fared better than the United States. None have fared worse. That list includes, but is not limited to, Afghanistan, Algeria, Brunei, the Cook Islands, Egypt, El Salvador, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, the Maldives, the Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Micronesia, Mongolia, Morocco, Nauru, Niue, Oman, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Qatar, Rwanda, Samoa, Saudi Arabia—and I could go on, but you get the point. 

That said our question is not, “Did Trump fail?” (Yes, he did.) The question is, “Did Claire fail?”

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Et tu, Claire?

So what was I writing on January 20 and in the week that followed?

Nothing.

On January 26, at last, I managed at least to send out a newsletter. About press-on manicures. Remember that one? Yep, that was one for the ages.

At least, I concluded, I’d have something more interesting to say, soon, because I was off to the Sahara. Not one word about the pandemic.

On February 1, I was remarkably prescient—the title of the newsletter was “Doomsday Ahead.” I warned my readers, that day, that the risk of nuclear war was rising—as indeed it is, even more so, now. Relations among the major powers were growingly hostile; the global balance of power was shifting; our efforts to roll back North Korea’s nuclear program had failed; our policy toward Iran hadn’t succeeded; and the world was growingly chaotic.

I stand by it all. It’s in fact much worse now than when I wrote it. 

But I’m not sure what to make of what I wrote next:

The world around, publics are devoting their anxious energies to worrying about the Wuhan coronavirus, which is frankly nuts. Yesterday, at the pharmacy, I saw some neurotic woman buying her son a box of face masks. (That memory’s going to make for one hell of a psychotherapy session some day.) I considered telling her that all she needed to do was wash her hands, and for God’s sake, stop biting the heads off those live bats. But there was a long line behind us, and it wouldn’t have been fair to everyone waiting on it. 

A right Nostradamus, I was.

By this point, Chinese authorities had locked down the entire province. Every member of Trump’s administration is now telling the New York Times—anonymously, of course—that by then, they were begging him to pay attention. This continued, according to the Washington Post, for weeks. Why do I believe them? Because I saw—we all saw—how Trump was behaving, and it just isn’t plausible to think that by February, no one—not Fauci, not Azar, not Navarro—was trying to get Trump to take this seriously.

On February 10, Trump held a rally in New Hampshire, attended by thousands. He declared, “by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

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Yes, I was oblivious in February, too. I screwed up: I was too busy having a neurotic midlife crisis. But there were just too many people around Trump whose job was to not screw this up, and by “this,” I mean “paying attention to things like a novel coronavirus emerging from China that’s caused our Asian allies to move to a near-war footing.” And by “job,” I mean, “They get paid a lot more than I do.”

It defies credulity to think all of these people were so preoccupied with their midlife crises and their press-on manicures that they didn’t notice a thing amiss. It’s much more plausible to imagine they were screaming their heads off—but Trump just didn’t want to hear it.

On March 3, eleven US airports were still receiving flights from China.

I dare are say that if I had been reading the news, by late February I’d have noticed that something was up. But where was I then? In the middle of the Sahara, without Internet access.

It’s not an excuse. But it is, at least, believable.

Your faithful correspondent had her head in the sand. Literally.