Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

I wrote this on March 17. claireberlinski.substack.com/p/life-in-lock…
Trump understood perfectly, in early February, that the virus was highly dangerous, airborne, and wildly contagious. He presumably understood this from Xi, and perhaps from diplomatic or intelligence sources in China.

I wrote this on April 13. claireberlinski.substack.com/p/a-preventabl…. I argued that January 20 was the key day. By then, it was obvious--to anyone who could read--that this was an emergency.

Any politician who failed to take this as an emergency, I wrote, by January 20--and to behave as if he or she took it as an emergency--should resign.

We now understand that Trump grasped very well that this was an emergency. He just didn't think it mattered.

But who else did he tell, besides Woodward? Did he--or anyone in his administration--think it appropriate to warn mayors, governors? What about our allies? Did he just sit privately on this information? Who else knew, and when did they know it?

In all of this, I worry most about my father. He's elderly and he has heart disease. He's at very high risk. But he knew this. His response to the stress was to quickly commission and edit two dozen articles and a research guide to Covid-19:
inference-review.com/report/sars-co…

In other words, I didn't have to beg my father to be careful. He understood exactly what this virus could do.

But I spoke to many friends who were at their wits' ends because they couldn't persuade their parents to take it seriously.

In late February, one of my closest friends told me that she planned to cancel a trip to visit me, in March, not because of the virus, per se, but because her daughter was terrified my friend would contract the virus here, die, and leave her motherless.

I told my friend this was insane and neurotic, and intimated that something wasn't quite right in their family if trips were being cancelled to assuage a teenage girl's hysteria. When I think about how I said this--so glib, so patronizing, so clueless--I am mortified.

Thank God she didn't listen to me. (Mind you, even if she'd been determined to come, by then the border was closed.) Still: Around the world, from late January to mid-March, people with only a passing knowledge of pandemics and epidemiology made major decisions.

My father took it very seriously, modified his behavior severely, and did so in time to save his own life.

I failed to take it seriously early enough, but I got lucky.

Others failed to take it seriously early enough--and weren't so lucky.

All of the people to whom I spoke, people who worried about a parent who seemed too blithe about the risk, a brother who thought it was "a hoax," a grandparent ...

It doesn't really matter whether Trump downplayed it because he was too stupid to understand it or too psychopathic to care. We already knew it was one or the other, and this means he's unfit. Woodward just settled it in favor of the latter.

I'm lucky. No one I love has caught the virus or died of it.
What must the people who've lost loved ones be feeling now, though? Especially if they tried, and failed, to convince the person they lost to take the virus seriously?