
US intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic - cyang08
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-intelligence-reports-from-january-and-february-warned-about-a-likely-pandemic/2020/03/20/299d8cda-6ad5-11ea-b5f1-a5a804158597_story.html
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digikazi
Any intelligence service worth its salt would have kept a close eye on the
situation developing in China, so in that respect this is not unexpected.

Personally I knew this could be very bad when I started hearing news about the
Chinese qarantining first Wuhan, then the surrounding cities. This involved
huge numbers of people and was done quite swiftly and on a scale never seen
before in modern times (to my knowledge anyway). Quite frankly it made the
hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I did wonder at the time how long
before it reaches our shores (not that long) and what would our response be
like (nowhere near as organised and focused although I guess things are
picking up). I'm in the UK.

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smacktoward
The newsworthy bit isn't that intelligence services noted the potential
threat. It's that the White House chose to ignore them.

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digikazi
The White House ignoring sound advice and doing its own thing... we've had a
few good years of that. How is that news? (By White House I mean one person,
and I'm saying this in a jokey way)

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WheelsAtLarge
Part of the problem was that we thought this was just another virus that we
could control. We were over confident and it didn't help that our president
thinks he knows everything. We have seen that most countries were unprepared
for the avalanche this virus is turning out to be. I think that only the
countries that have gone thru a previous epidemic have it under some control.
The world was caught unprepared.

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JamesBarney
To be fair this has been on Reddit and Twitter since late January. So it
wasn't exactly a state secret.

Here is the post that first alerted me to the possible pandemic 55 days ago.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/eusojf/conc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/eusojf/concerning_the_recent_wuhan_coronavirus_outbreak/)

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chrismcb
Didn't the intelligence community warn of a likely pandemic with sars and
swine and...

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monkeydreams
>Didn't the intelligence community warn of a likely pandemic with sars and
swine and...

Yes, and MERS as well, and these warnings were listened to. Actions were
taken. Experts deployed. Testing enacted. A whole machine of pandemic
expertise, sitting dormant, shuddered to life, and pinched off the supply of
fresh hosts for the viruses.

This time, not so much.

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michaelmrose
I seem to recall that we were told that those people could be hired back
really quickly if needed while disbanding the part of the NSC that was
supposed to take point on this.

