The impeachment was over by mid-January so that timeline doesn't line up. As for the executive office holder, he spent the next several months on the one hand telling a journalist the virus was a dire national security threat, much worse than flu and really nasty, while at the same time telling the public is was just a flu and a hoax, and blocking emergency preparations because he didn't want to spook the markets.

Nice priorities there. A prerequisite to taking any kind of coordinated or effective action is actually treating the threat as a priority. Clearly the chief executive, while being completely aware of the threat and its severity, had other things on his mind that took precedence over the risk of half a million dead Americans.