“Lisa Monaco, who served as Barack Obama’s former Homeland Security adviser (2013–2017), tells Axios the U.S. squandered the time bought by China’s aggressive (if belated) containment efforts and the travel restrictions Trump imposed on China.
“‘As we saw this coming out of China in December, there should have really been ramping up,’ says Monaco, who was warning that a pandemic like this one might strike long before it did.
“’If you’re thinking about a worst-case scenario here, you would be thinking, do we have sufficient testing capacity? How are we going to have surge capacity for hospitals and the health care system? What is going to be the need for personal protective equipment?’
“What we’re now seeing, Monaco says, is ‘the foreseeable result of neglect of this issue as the top threat that it is…'”