Increasing Coronavirus death toll in USA- wages of ignoring Army sleuths’ warning

Charubrata Ray

The U.S. intelligence officials warned in November last that a contagious disease was spreading through China’s Wuhan region, but the US Administration took it casually. The revelation was made by the ABC News which was told by two officials, being acquainted with the documents, that in its   November 2019, the US Army’s National Center for Medical Intelligence report, an analysis of wire and computer intercepts and satellite images, expressed worries about the coronavirus without naming it. The monthly report, confidential, stated "Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event," a source 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.

The Défense Secretary Mark Esper, apparently caught unawares, stated that he could not recall that the NCMI warned that the epidemic in China was spiralling out of control in November. “We have many people who watch this closely. We have the premier infectious disease research institute in America, within the United States Army. So, our people who work these issues directly watch this all the time,” he added.

The officials who disclosed the matter to the news channel "The timeline of the intel side of this may be further back than we’re discussing," a source said of preliminary reports from Wuhan. "But this was definitely being briefed beginning at the end of November as something the military needed to take a posture on."
However, this lack of response to such a serious issue comes handy for the US President Donald President Trump for accused him of not taking the threat of the pandemic seriously. He  delayed much to restrict air travel with China in late January and downplayed the threat of Covid 19.

Prediction models by mathematical epidemiologists, submitted to the White House Coronavirus Task Force estimate that Covid 19 might kill between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans, although tentatively as the trajectory of Coronavirus is too early to conjecture. The Director of the Centers for Disease Control. Robert Redfield seems to downplay coronavirus models. He says that the death toll is exaggerated. “I think you're going to see the numbers are, in fact, going to be much less than what would have been predicted by the models,” according to him.

Dr. John Brownstein, a Harvard epidemiologist and ABC News contributor, reacted to CDC director, suggesting that such statements would mislead Americans into feeling a sense that Covid 19’s spread is under control. “Projections and models across the board are accounting for a reduction in mobility because of social distancing, so it’s way too soon to declare any kind of victory, This is not a moment for people to relax because they feel the models are wrong. We just got to realize that this is an indication despite all the suffering and the death that has occurred that what we have been doing has been working,” he shot back.

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Frontier
Apr 10, 2020