US intelligence services warned of likely virus pandemic in November

President Trump has made much of the conviction on his part that nothing could have prepared the US for the coronavirus crisis. Then we hear that a major pandemic scenario exercise was held to test America's ability to cope with a new virus. And now a report on ABC News claims intelligence officials warned the White House that the coronavirus epidemic in Hubei province in China was spreading fast and could lead to a "cataclysmic" event. So, lots of warnings and theoretical preparations, yet now the US is the worst-hit nation on the planet, seemingly unable to cope with the rising deaths, a lack of medical equipment and no federal consensus on how tough to be to enforce social distancing. Is this a total scandal which could or should lead to the downfall of Donald Trump? You only have to look at history to conclude that the answer is no. Planning for a crisis is one thing, actually believing that it's going to happen in order to be fully ready if it happens is something else. It's human nature not to believe that the worst will happen. This is why there is still a total unreadiness in this world for what is almost bound to be catastrophic climate changes in the next 10-20 years. Even when you see massive chunks of ice collapsing in the Antarctic, and rising sea levels in vulnerable low-lying countries, and unprecedented rising temperatures around the world, you carry on with your life just not quite believing that all the apocalyptic warnings are actually going to happen in our lifetime or the lifetime of our children. Surely, we argue, technology or something we don't yet know about it will arrive and sort it all out. No one ever believes it when a man stands on a soapbox and shouts that the end of the world is nigh. We all laugh when frightened doomsday religious sects seek refuge at the top of a mountain to prepare for God's mighty destruction of the planet on a particular day only to have to come down again looking sheepish when God has failed them. Again. According to the ABC report, the warning of an impending coronavirus disaster first appeared in the daily presidential intelligence brief in January. The intelligence services had picked up communications from within China which indicated the virus was out of control and the Chinese Communist government was failing to take the necessary steps to counter it. Whether Trump was being told the virus could spread around the world and hit the US with ferocity is not clear. But as every US president has learned over the years, intelligence is not always what it is cracked up to be. It is rarely so overwhelmingly prescient that it is obvious to any president what he needs to do. Immediately. Take 9/11 as a classic example. There were warning signs piling up that al-Qaeda was plotting a major terrorist attack against the US, and plenty of evidence that local FBI agents picked up in San Diego and south Florida which indicated potentially suspicious foreigners were learning to fly commercial aircraft. But a composite picture drawing all the intel tidbits into a warning package for the then president George W Bush never arrived on his desk. Sure, there was a ton of intelligence around, some of it circumstantial but did anyone come forward and actually say, "Mr President, an al-Qaeda 'airplane plot' is about to be put into action and the targets will be something iconic, like the Twin Towers." No, they didn't, and even if they did, would Bush have closed the skies over the US to all air traffic for weeks as a precaution? No, he wouldn't, because such a move would have been highly alarmist, and a disaster for airlines and business and trade. "Give me proof," Bush would have said. It's the same with the coronavirus pandemic. A virus crisis in China is a virus crisis in China. Why should it impinge on our way of life? So, however many warnings may or may not have been given prior to the arrival of COVID-19 in the US and Europe and everywhere else in the world, it would have been unrealistic for us all to have gone into lockdown BEFORE it spread beyond China. It's human nature. We can't believe something is going to happen until it happens.