THE WRONG MAN IN THE WRONG PLACE AT THE WRONG TIME:

A year before the outbreak, in early 2019, the Department of Health and Human Services ran a set of four pandemic planning exercises, known as Crimson Contagion. The exercises assumed a new influenza virus was rising out of China, but did not spotlight the possibility of a virus spreading asymptomatically. They also assumed lockdowns and school closures would be short, failed to take into account the need to scale up testing, and assumed the government had enough medicine -- 30 million doses -- to treat the hypothetical flu. "In the Covid war," the report recalls, "there were no such medicines at hand. The temporary lockdown and closures quickly and foreseeably spawned the question: If good medicines are not yet available, what should we do now?"

"The lockdowns could not be sustained," the report says. "But leaders did not develop and communicate practical alternative strategies."

In February 2020, the focus was on containment, with measures such as the travel ban on China and repatriation of Americans, including those stranded on cruise ships. Emergency mobilization efforts "languished," the report noted. There was "confusion and friction about who was in charge of what problems." The government's "crisis action plan" amounted to little more than jargon. "There was little in it about what people would actually do."

On Feb. 24, 2020, President Donald Trump tweeted from India, "The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA ... Stock market starting to look very good to me!" But according to the report, that same day, the White House task force concluded "containment was failing." It was time to shift to mitigation. The next day, a high-ranking Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official, Nancy Messonnier, announced that community spread in the United States was inevitable. The stock market dived.

"President Trump was furious," the report recalls. He kept downplaying the danger. "It's going to disappear," he said on Feb. 27. "Everything is really under control," he said Feb. 29.

It was not. The authors of the report show, in detail, how federal crisis management "splintered by the third week of March." HHS Secretary Alex Azar had placed the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, Robert Kadlec, in charge of the HHS effort -- but at the same time, Vice President Mike Pence's staff kicked him off the White House task force. The head of the Food and Drug Administration was not even on the task force for the first month. The CDC was "fractured into too many missions." While some officials recognized the urgency of a crash program of testing and masks, "Kadlec had no money, no real emergency fund."

"By late April, as a frightened and bewildered country became more and more confused about continuing business and school closures, and after some brow-raising comments at a White House briefing in which he discussed treating the virus with light, heat, or disinfectant, Trump essentially detached himself from his own government," the report says. "He moved toward questioning and challenging what other government officials were doing."

"The administration abdicated its wartime responsibility to lead," they add. "It left the battlefield, and the war strategy" to the states and localities. By April, the White House chief of staff concluded the task force was "useless and broken."

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