It now appears they the US was holding ‘simulations’ from January to October 2019:
‘New York Times : Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded‘.
‘…The outbreak of the respiratory virus began in China and was quickly spread around the world by air travelers, who ran high fevers. In the United States, it was first detected in Chicago, and 47 days later, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. By then it was too late: 110 million Americans were expected to become ill, leading to 7.7 million hospitalized and 586,000 dead.
That scenario, code-named “Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August..’
I sure wish I had a crystal ball like theirs….
And would you believe it, T’rump does a pirouette:
‘…President Trump moved from dismissing the coronavirus as a few cases that would soon be “under control” to his revisionist announcement on Monday that he had known all along that a pandemic was on the way…’