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WASHINGTON What happens when the president of the United States tries to lie , wish and tweet a pandemic away?

As it turns out, it puts a government response four to six weeks behind schedule, possibly resulting in thousands or even tens or hundreds of thousands more Americans getting seriously ill and dying.

They underprepared, and now we have to catch up, said Jeremy Konyndyk, who worked on the widely praised 2014 Ebola outbreak response under former President Barack Obama . We could have been in a dramatically different place at this point.

On Jan. 22, the day before China imposed a draconian quarantine on the province where the virus originated, Donald Trump claimed the disease was totally under control, that it was just in a single patient who had come from China. Its going to be just fine.

On Feb. 10, as the virus was starting to spread in Italy and Iran, Trump told a meeting of the nations governors at the White House: A lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat.

On Feb. 26, the day after a top official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that life in the United States was likely to change very quickly, Trump claimed that there were only 15 cases here, and that number would soon fall to zero.

Two days later, he called the virus the latest hoax that Democrats and the media were using to hurt the economy and, in turn, his chances for reelection. Indeed, over the course of February, he spoke and posted on Twitter repeatedly that the coronavirus and COVID-19, the disease it causes, had not killed as many as the seasonal flu and suggested that Americans should buy stocks.

It was not until Friday that Trump declared a national emergency, sending the official signal that local governments and hospitals around the country should take the problem seriously and ensuring that federal money would help reimburse their costs. In the meantime, only a tiny fraction of Americans have been tested for the disease, meaning officials do not have enough data to allocate resources most efficiently.

Hes just failing miserably, said Juliette Kayyam, who helped handle the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak and the British Petroleum oil spill for Obamas Department of Homeland Security and now lectures on emergency management at Harvards Kennedy School of Government. Its about a president who saw a category five hurricane coming ashore, and just let it come.