On March 13, walking around the West Wing of the White House, you wouldn’t know we were about two weeks away from a synchronized, national shutdown of nonessential businesses. I was at the White House that day for a scheduled meeting to see President Trump to share my views on the unfolding crisis. We were three days away from the lockdown of San Francisco, seven days away from the stay-at-home order in New York. Our models would later show that the epidemic was already spreading uncontrollably across the nation.1 And yet a lenience about the personal dangers pervaded the building among the
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