, who had been based in Beijing as a journalist, argued during meetings in February that transmission was higher than being reported in China and that if community spread began in Europe there was little prospect of containing it.
Serious deliberations about Europe didn’t resume until mid-March. By then, Pottinger had gained a new ally., who had joined the task force earlier that month, entered a White House meeting armed with worrisome data on a surge in cases in northern Italy, as well as numbers that showed accelerating spread across Europe. Then, on March 11, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic.
Kushner then gathered with senior policy adviser Stephen Miller in the latter’s office to work on a draft. The duo were joined at times by Pence and were still making edits until shortly before Trump was scheduled to go live on television at 9 p.m. “Never has a less prepared set of remarks been delivered from that room,” said a former administration official.
At Dulles International Airport outside Washington, the cabin door on United Flight 989, headed for Frankfurt, Germany, had just been secured when Trump’s speech began airing on television networks. As he spoke, passengers began rising from their seats in panic. Brandishing bulletins about the speech on their cellphones, some pushed for the exits.The pilot and cabin crew began making frantic calls to supervisors for guidance.
“There was fear and chaos,” she said. Save for the tense days that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, she said, “I have never seen anything like it.”Airlines’ websites and phone lines were inundated in the hours after Trump’s Oval address. American Airlines fielded about 700,000 calls on March 12, a spokesman said, more than five times the number on a typical day.
“We had customer agents calling the security desk by the hundreds, telling us about individuals that have the symptoms,” the official said. “Our answer was to follow policy,” the official said, which meant they were not to be kept off aircraft unless they were demonstrably unfit to fly or had recently traveled to China.
Delta and American had announced on Jan. 31 they were suspending routes to China before Trump announced the restrictions. United informed the White House it had already decided to do the same but was willing to hold off on announcing it publicly if Trump was prepared to act swiftly in issuing an order, officials said. Eager to claim credit for acting to contain the virus, Trump’s announcement came within hours.
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