In September 2019, just before the Covid outbreak, the White House Council of Economic Advisers issued its own little-noticed report. It estimated that a pandemic (influenza, for example) would cause economic damage that could range from nearly half a trillion to nearly four trillion dollars. It thought, if the pandemic was really bad, it could kill more than half a million people.22 That 2019 report may have seemed alarmist. It actually greatly underestimated the impact of what was about to hit.
