There's a timeline here. [1] We started screening at airports and ports on January 17th. The first tests were created (and found to be faulty) on January 20th, before China had even issued its first public warning. This was all even though the CDC still evaluated the risk as low, and it was not clear if human to human transmission was even possible. The Wiki does not specify, but it's implied that by January 27th formal testing for all relevant entrants became mandated as we reached thousands of people being tested. By February 2nd travel restrictions were in place, which many media outlets then framed as being racist - emphasizing how the public at large was still treating the virus at that point.
It does not seem like a poor response, in my opinion.
Right and the timeline says that in late November 2019 the IC said there’s high risk of it becoming a cataclysmic event.
Part of the argument against the Feb 2nd travel restrictions was actually that it was too late to be effective. COVID was already confirmed in the US in mid January. It had almost certainly already been circulating for weeks and obviously was definitely circulating internationally, which is why the epidemiologists weren’t advocating for a travel ban from China. I wouldn’t be surprised if it helped soften the blow a little bit, but there’s no way it was going to substantially change the course of events and there’s no way it’s a replacement for mass testing within the country.
Yes, “the public at large” was mostly wrong. The IC wasn’t. The White House was privy to much more information than the public and likely even more than CDC was. That’s the whole point?
Trump came out and said in June 2020 that he specifically told the federal agencies to slow down testing. Travel ban or no travel ban, that was simply the wrong decision and it was wrong for the wrong reasons (making his numbers look bad). There’s being wrong because reality is hard to parse in the moment, or because you have incomplete information, or because mistakes just happen (e.g. the botched test manufacturing) and there’s being wrong because selfish political ends dominate public health considerations. Those types of “wrong” are not equivalent.
We need to get back to the probability point, because you're adding a word that is not in the article you linked, nor any article to my knowledge. From the article you linked:
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"Analysts concluded [unknown disease] could be a cataclysmic event," one of the sources said of the NCMI’s report. "It was then briefed multiple times to" the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House. Wednesday night, the Pentagon issued a statement denying the "product/assessment" existed.
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There is no mention of high risk anywhere. It's just another risk among countless others. In this particular case the wording of your article is also suggestive that the initial reports were not even concerned about it coming stateside, but rather its impact on the US forces in the region. It only made it to the President's daily briefing, and seemingly only once at that, sometime in January. Also remember even well into January it wasn't clear if human transmission was possible, and it was initially have thought to have come from an animal that US forces could potentially have been exposed to - like malaria, for example.
Yes, there was lots of uncertainty and for sure we do not know how many "potentially cataclysmic events" appear in the PDB on a weekly basis. That uncertainty is predictable and in fact is written directly into the NSC's pandemic playbook. However, looking at that same playbook, it's a little difficult to get from the information we had at any given point to "do absolutely nothing in January", then "close the borders to China in Feb", then "slow down testing to make your numbers look better." The first two errors are pretty understandable IMO, but the last one is not. Your argument is "we didn't know that much," and I agree, it was hard to understand. My argument is that the White House, per its own admission, was actively trying not to know much.
Of course the issue is that the administration did not use the NSC's playbook, or apparently any other playbook, per their own admission. That's another unforgivable error.
I linked to a timeline [1] above. We most certainly didn't "do nothing", if you'll excuse the double negative. I do agree with you that the White House actively tried to avoid creating a panic in people, which one can argue was good or bad. But in terms of their actual actions, I don't see too many things that I would have changed, without hindsight.
Though I'd add that even with hindsight, it's not easy to come up with suggestions - because many different countries throughout the world tried all sorts of different approaches, and there was never any real silver bullet. And of course those efforts also, themselves, have consequences which we will be dealing with for years to come. So one has to balance the cost of a solution, rather than just looking for a solution under the logic that it MUST be better than doing nothing (which I am not implying would be ideal either).
Let me 'append' my previous claim then. I don't know anything I would have done differently than I'd expect to have significantly have changed the outcome. Obviously juking the numbers, or trying to at least, is stupid (that goes for lowering and increasing). On the other hand, I don't expect that played a meaningful role in what played out, well excepting some sort of butterfly effect argument - but with such, one can argue literally anything.
Isn’t the whole premise of your claim that making good decisions in lieu of good information is very hard? Wouldn’t better, more widespread testing earlier on have helped us understand the severity of the disease, which populations were at particular risk and which were not, which geographies most needed injections of medical supplies and expertise, which social interventions were making a dent and which weren’t, whether and where schools needed to be closed?
There were tons of extremely important, extremely consequential decisions that had to be made without information we [maybe] could’ve had. I suppose one could argue that Trump probably wasn’t successful/consequential in slowing down testing (I presume we’ll never know), but I don’t think you can argue that the velocity of testing was inconsequential.
Even with all the data we have now, I'm not sure there's any real silver bullets. Don't just look to the US, but look everywhere. You have a really wide sample of approaches. Some countries went ultra authoritarian and forced just about every intervention imaginable - and then some beyond that, while other countries did pretty much nothing, and then you had a mixture of everything in between. Yet after all is said and done, when you look at the actual death rates - everybody tended to fall within a fraction of a percent of each other, with outliers largely due to demographic reasons. For instance India had an extremely low death rate, but that was probably mostly because they have quite a young population.
And essentially all interventions came with major costs. For a hypothetical, imagine that we know for a fact that school closures saved 5,000 lives. But you also know that you damaged the mental and social development of millions of students. Development from which it seems many of this generation may simply never recover from. It's not like there's a good choice, because both options completely suck. Of all the things we tried, it doesn't seem there was any sort of "free lunch" where you got a really significant benefit with no cost. Everything came with costs, and those costs were often extremely high.
It does not seem like a poor response, in my opinion.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pande...