WASHINGTON — "Any way you cut it, this will be terrible," a senior clinical consultant at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, composed the evening of Jan. 28, in an email to a gathering of general wellbeing specialists spread around the legislature and colleges. "The anticipated size of the episode as of now appears to be difficult to accept." Seven days after the first coronavirus case had been distinguished in the United States, and six long a long time before President Trump at last made forceful move to face the peril the country was confronting — a pandemic that is currently figure to take a huge number of American lives — Dr. Mecher was asking the upper positions of the country's general wellbeing organization to wake up and get ready for the chance of undeniably increasingly exceptional activity. "You all ridiculed me shouting to close the schools," he kept in touch with the gathering, which called itself "Red Dawn,"...