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And Here It Comes: There’s an early January PDB on the Novel Coronavirus

From ABC News today:

“Analysts concluded [a novel coronavirus pandemic] could be a cataclysmic event,” one of the sources 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.

From that warning in November, the sources described repeated briefings through December for policy-makers and decision-makers across the federal government as well as the National Security Council at the White House. All of that culminated with a detailed explanation of the problem that appeared in the President’s Daily Brief of intelligence matters in early January, the sources said. For something to have appeared in the PDB, it would have had to go through weeks of vetting and analysis…

We need the PDB declassified and released, to understand the full magnitude of the public policy disaster this administration has visited upon America, just like this PDB of August 6, 2001 “Bin Laden determined to strike in US” was released.

For These Times

If you despair of the administration bringing us safely through this test, then let this provide some hope, click here.

Elgar’s Nimrod Variation IX, from the Enigma Variations – musicians of the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra and the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.

CDC Estimates of the Covid-19 Toll

[Update – Figure added 3/14 1:30pm Central. Source: Torsten Slok, DB.]

From The Hill today:

One model from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggested that between 160 million and 210 million Americans could contract the disease over as long as a year. Based on mortality data and current hospital capacity, the number of deaths under the CDC’s scenarios ranged from 200,000 to as many as 1.7 million.

It found as many as 21 million people might need hospitalization, a daunting figure in a nation with just about 925,000 hospital beds.

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