Coronavirus Report: The Hill’s Steve Clemons interviews Tom Bossert

The Hill’s Steve Clemons interviews Tom Bossert, former Homeland Security Advisor to President Donald Trump and  Chief Strategy Officer at Trinity Cyber. Bossert is also a national security analyst for ABC News.

Some excerpts from the interview below: 

Steve Clemons asked Tom Bossert to elaborate on his call three years ago while in the Donald Trump White House for a bio-defense strategy against a possible pandemic

{mosads}TOM BOSSERT: I guess that one way to answer your question isn’t that we all had some crystal ball. It was just the realization that human beings are susceptible to any kind of novel virus and a contagion that spreads among a population that doesn’t have any immunities to it. You know, we all walk around with some immunities to certain strains of flu and colds and so forth, but a new one, a novel thing like this, that spreads like fire through dry tinder. It’s terrifying when you think about it. So I guess the real answer to your question isn’t that in 2017 I was worried. The answer is I became educated on this in 2003, 2004 and 2005, and the assumptions from then were really key. It was that a timely, localized response would be imperative to stopping the spread. And, of course that’s what we have seen demonstrated pretty effectively. And I’m proud of what the American people have done. But it’s also been slightly modified in this particular coronavirus response. We weren’t able to for a number of reasons we can talk about to localize our initial closures. We got to a certain point for a certain set of reasons where we had a national clamp down all at once. Now, of course, that comes with the attendant problem of economic failure or closure or strain. I think it will just be strain that we will overcome. But we now have to contend with it as we lift some of these restrictions, and what I would say is the lesson from the past is that we should lift them in that local fashion that we had preferred to implement. 

On if Bossert were in the White House today and had seen the cases in Wuhan emerging, what he would have done

TOM BOSSERT:  I think I’d be doing the same thing inside that I’ve been doing outside. And that is trying to educate people to wrap their minds around something that very few people ever think about. And, you know, I have to sometimes take a deep pause and try to remain humble here. I don’t know anything that wasn’t taught to me by some real gods in this field, public health officials and doctors that deserve really all the credit for this. Now they’ve been teaching this to me, and we’ve been exercising and planning and preparing ever since since 2005 — really since 2003 and 2004 with Sen. Bill Frist. But the idea of them taking all of that experience from 20 years and trying to educate others leaders in the political in public health fields overnight is a challenge. And, you know, it’s It’s a fine balance between sounding like an alarmist and giving a clear kind of alarm bell. …One of the things that I started doing in January and would have been doing if I was in the White House would have been training to contextualize all of this kind of this difficult nomenclature. You know, if you talk in terms of curves and first root of amplitudes and so forth, people tend to gloss over. But if you say you know, this isn’t like an iceberg. I tried that for a while. This isn’t like a star. …Then I moved to a fire analogy. People get that. And so what we’ll do the rest of our conversation today is put this into context as if it were a fire. And when it’s early and you see it coming, you yell “Fire!” Now that’s not meant to cause panic. But you yell fire in a way that people understand so they could go still deal with it while there’s time. The time will come to analyze what was done and not done.

TOM BOSSERT: Well President Trump, at the first inflection point, did the right thing and that was shut down travel from China at the second inflection point. … I guess the objective answer is that for seven states, including New York, we put in place these social distancing measures. We put in the social distancing guidelines after they had already reached a point where they wouldn’t be as effective so late. But for 43 other states, we put them in early in time, and we’re seeing a really, really significant reduction in the attack as a result. In fact, so much so — I don’t want to say this in a way that people make me own this number, Steve — but, you know, early math, back of the envelope math suggests that when you disaggregate these numbers instead of looking at the entire country entire death per 1,000,000 population assessment. But when you separate with seven states where we see the worst problem from the other 43 you end up seeing that some had an attack rate of almost 20% that which we were trying to avoid, that we saw the Diamond Princess cruise ship early, right others, and the rest had an aggregate of 1% attack rate. So what people are saying on TV is that social distancing works. That’s true, and we have to persist. 

On reopening the country and jump-starting the economy

TOM BOSSERT: You have to have a Plan B. Well, the Plan B was there. And you hear Dr. Birx talking about it now? But the Plan B was there. We have ah surveillance system that looks for flu-like symptoms every year, and it’s really amazing if you go back to look at it. I was looking at a time with some of my informal advisers, and they were showing me that the seasonal flu does this right, and it always levels that where there’s never a second spike. Well, what we were seeing was a second spike in seasonal flu reported or flu like symptoms being reported in the emergency departments in certain places, especially like New York. And now it was pretty clear back then. But it’s really clear now that that second spike is still climbing and it’s obviously a result of COVID. So you have to move to that syndromic surveillance as opposed to that diagnostic surveillance approach. Well, we didn’t — we had some time in there. This is only a matter of days or weeks I’m talking about, although that matters. So the reason I raised it, Steve, your question is, now we have to determine whether we’re making that same mistake twice. All of us with a great deal of humility have to admit that nobody’s perfect as we run through so-called evidence like this. But in retrospect, I would say the next inflection point is this — a May 1st inflection point. And if what we’re doing is relying on a set of diagnostic tests that were not at the volume that we like, we should kind of admit that to ourselves. It’s not a failure. Admit that we’re not going to have as many as we like and then prioritize their use right here.

On restarting the country

TOM BOSSERT:  Here’s the prescription for that. There are two forms of infectious people — those that know it and those that don’t.  Those that know it have symptoms, even if they’re mild symptoms. And I think the public health community has moved to the state in which people have symptoms, even if they’re miles are presumptively positive for COVID and isolate themselves accordingly and quarantine those that they’ve been in contact with. That’s the contact tracing part that will help us slow the spread and maintain a slow spread until we get a vaccine. And then for those that are sick but don’t know it. Those were “the well” right now. Those that feel well, they want to re enter the workforce. We’re going to have to prioritize the scarce, accurate diagnostic tests for them and start testing “the well.” That’s counterintuitive to your question, but if we do that, we’ll take off the field the people that are “well but infectious” that don’t feel it and those that do feel it. And if you reduce the number of people that are infectious from our society, then you have a good outcome.