In September last year, the National Security Council in the White House, together with Trump's then economic adviser, Swedish Tomas Philipson, wrote a report warning of the consequences of a pandemic.
It is estimated that a pandemic could lead to the deaths of over half a million Americans, and cost the US economy several thousand billion dollars.
-It's just an incredibly strange context, we had no idea that the coronavirus would start spreading in the world three months later, says Tomas Philipson when Ekonomibyrån calls him on video call.
According to an article in The New York Times in March, however, the report remained a desk product and Tomas Philipson himself publicly underestimated the pandemic's costs to the US economy.
"Dramatically fast"
That image is not shared by Tomas Philipson.
He believes that several of the advice and recommendations that Philipson was involved in developing in 2019 have become part of the Corona fight.
-Usually, it usually takes at least a decade to develop a vaccine against a new virus, but now the United States is about to succeed in doing so within ten months.
It's dramatically fast, says Philipson.
Tomas Philipson was born and raised in Sweden, studied mathematics at Uppsala University and moved to the USA to study American collage - and stayed.
Until the end of June this year, Tomas Philipson served as chairman of the Trump Economic Council in the White House.
Has been fun working with the president
"I managed many times to persuade him to follow the line we proposed in the Economic Council and he was very receptive to economic arguments," says Philipson.
He ended his assignment as an adviser in the White House earlier than expected.
According to the American business newspaper Wall Street Journal, he was outmaneuvered but himself says he left his role because he fell ill with Corona.
-Working with the president was fun!
I think it was a very productive relationship that I had with Trump until I left, he says.
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