Coronavirus: White House ‘blocking calls to Trump’ from former adviser trying to warn him how dire pandemic is

Donald Trump’s inner circle at the White House is blocking calls from at least one former advisor who has been trying to advise the president on the US coronavirus response, it has been claimed.

Thomas Bossert, a former Trump homeland security adviser, has reportedly tried several times in recent days to reach the president or vice president to warn them just how dire the coronavirus pandemic really is, only to be blocked by officials, according to The New York Times, citing “two people familiar” with the matter.

Mr Trump’s administration has been upbraided for its handling of the global crisis, with little guidance for the public, inconsistent restrictions on travel and events, and testing in US hospitals slow to be made available.

A lack of testing kits means as few as 11,000 US citizens may have been tested for the disease to date, even though the first known case was detected on 21 January in Washington state.

Meanwhile in South Korea, over 10,000 people are being tested every day after a huge national effort to stop the spread of the virus. The measures have seen a significant fall in cases.

Despite growing frustrations, Mr Trump has maintained the crisis in the US is not that bad.

“Compared to other places, we are in really good shape,” he said on Thursday after announcing bans on direct travel from all of Europe apart from the UK, “and we want to keep it that way.”

Mr Trump’s failure to address numerous concerns immediately rattled US financial markets, which plummeted a further 10 per cent, making Thursday the worst single day since Black Monday in 1987.

With the combined losses of recent weeks, the markets have now lost about 85 per cent of the gains they had made during the entire Trump presidency.

Mr Trump has repeatedly pointed to the markets as a key argument for his re-election this year.

Following the claims Mr Bossert had not been able to reach the president or vice president by phone, he denied on Thursday he had tried to see Mr Trump and been unable to, but would not elaborate on his contacts with the White House, according to The New York Times.

Nonetheless, Mr Bossert has made repeated warnings on Twitter that the Trump administration must take rapid action to mitigate the impacts of the disease.

On Wednesday, Mr Bossert tweeted: “The US and Europe are less than two weeks behind Italy. We should be learning from the experiences of China, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Italy. If we fail to learn from them, we do so at our own peril. History will remember what we don’t do at this critical moment.”

Then after Mr Trump’s Thursday address Mr Bossert responded: “There’s little value to European travel restrictions. Poor use of time & energy. Earlier, yes. Now, travel restrictions/screening are less useful. We have nearly as much disease here in the US as the countries in Europe. We MUST focus on layered community mitigation measures-Now!”

He added: “In two weeks, we will regret wasting time and energy on travel restrictions and wish we focused more on hospital preparation and large scale community mitigation.”