CBS News: “‘You just breath the air, and that’s how it’s passed … This is deadly stuff,’ said President Donald Trump. The date of Bob Woodward’s bombshell recording, February 7, is important. President Trump knew then the threat of COVID-19 – and had no qualms about downplaying it. ‘We don’t want to have to show panic,’ Mr. Trump said Wednesday after news of Woodward’s recording broke. ‘We’re not going to show panic, and that’s exactly what I did.’ But panic tanked the markets. On February 25, the Dow Jones was down nearly 900 points, a disaster of a down day, capped by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Dr. Nancy Messonnier, who gave a coronavirus warning: ‘We are asking the American public to work with us to prepare in the expectation that this could be bad.’ No fan of bad news, the following day President Trump announced his own coronavirus task force, with Vice President Mike Pence in charge – and control of the COVID message shifted from the CDC in Atlanta, to the White House. Downplaying the seriousness of the outbreak, Mr. Trump said on February 26, ‘When you have 15 people and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.’ Correspondent Martha Teichner asked, was that when it happened? Was that when politics, when partisanship became the lens through which Americans began viewing the pandemic?”