Richard Burr made his remarks at a private luncheon late last month.
Weeks before President Donald Trump declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency, Sen. Richard Burr privately offered a grim prognosis for the outbreak while previewing some of the massive disruptions soon to come, according to a previously unreported recording obtained by NPR.
In his comments to the Tar Heel Circle in North Carolina on Feb. 27, Burr gave attendees a chilling warning about the severity of the coronavirus at a time when there were only a little over a dozen reported confirmed cases in the U.S. and President Donald Trump was suggesting that number would drop down to zero in short order.
“There will be, I'm sure, times that communities, probably some in North Carolina, have a transmission rate where they say, let's close schools for two weeks, everybody stay home,” he says in the recording. Burr's tone in private went well beyond an op-ed he co-authored with Sen. Lamar Alexander , reassuring Americans that although they were rightfully concerned about the outbreak, it was being properly handled by the authorities.
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