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Hi, can you do that listeners, Allison here? This week I just had to share with you a segment from our friends over at Post Reports.

Martin Powers, the host of our Daily News Show, interviewed two Washington Post reporters, Yasmin Abu Talab and Damian Paleta about their new book.

Both Damian and Yasmin have been guests on this show many times before, so you'll likely recognize their voices.

Their new book is called Nightmare Scenario, inside the Trump administration's response to the pandemic that changed history.

And it's a totally compelling read about the early days of the White House's pandemic response last year.

Here's Martin's conversation with Yasmin and Damian.

In retrospect, it's kind of striking because the US was ranked the best prepared country for a pandemic.

Yasmin Abu Talab is a health policy reporter at the post.

The people responsible in the health agencies, you know, across the government knew that there were always going to be challenges and something like this.

This was certainly a problem that was appreciated by several administrations.

George W. Bush had read The Great Influenza and then demanded a number of briefings on pandemic preparedness.

Bill Clinton talked about this, Barack Obama talked about this, but I don't think any of those plans or discussions or infusions of money that might have come here and there appreciated the scale of what we endured here.

For the last few months, Yasmin and economics editor Damian Paleta have been looking back to the early days of the pandemic in the US.

It was as they put it a nightmare scenario.

There was talk of what if there is a pandemic flu or a pandemic respiratory virus, but the reality was that the country just didn't have the resources or the infrastructure to really deal with it.

The public health system wasn't ready.

The national stockpile of emergency medical equipment certainly wasn't ready.

And I think we saw that play out in a pretty devastating way with the shortages of N95 masks and gowns and gloves and just basic equipment for health care workers.

Hospitals in the southern and western parts of the US are finding their ICUs filling up with COVID-19 patients.

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