Almost every day for weeks at his daily briefings New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has bemoaned the fact that the state was deluged by a wave of coronavirus coming in from Europe and setting off the COVID-19 pandemic. “The strain in New York came from Europe, it didn't come from China,” Cuomo has said repeatedly in different versions. When the pandemic was raging in Europe in February, “nobody was watching Italy and Europe at the time. Nobody was even thinking about it,” he has complained.

And why was that?

The US intelligence agencies were instead thinking about India -- a reaction based on stereotypes about India being a source of unchecked diseases and pathogens.

Conversely, if they ignored Europe, it was likely because of the stereotypes about it.

A Reuters report on February 27 said that US Intelligence agencies were “warning that there were concerns about how India would cope with a widespread outbreak.”Reuters said, “While there are only a few known cases in India, one source said the country’s available countermeasures and the potential for the virus to spread given India’s dense population was a focus of serious concern.”

The source was not identified and could be from an intelligence agency or from US Congress.

Reuters also said that according to an unnamed source the agencies were using a range of tools ranging from “undercover informants to electronic eavesdropping tools” to monitor the situation.

India with 1.3 billion people had only three cases on March 1 and reached 1,590 only on April 1, according to Statista. The number of cases reached 100,340 only by May 18, according to Johns Hopkins University (JHU).

In contrast, Italy with a population of 60 million had 1,701 on March 1, according to Statista and steadily rising to 225,886 cases by May 18, according to JHU.

Reuters had an official of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee praising the role of intelligence services.

“Addressing the threat has both national security and economic dimensions, requiring a concerted government-wide effort and the IC is playing an important role in monitoring the spread of the outbreak, and the worldwide response,” it quoted the unnamed official.  

Trump imposed a travel ban on China on January 31 but five weeks would elapse before he put a similar ban on 26 countries of the Schengen area, including Italy, on March 11 and extended it to Britain and Ireland on March 14.

Cuomo said the front door to China was closed, while the backdoor to Europe was left open and "people who visited from Europe walked right through the airport

He said that according to a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report “from February you had 139,000 travellers coming from Italy, 1.74 million from other European countries where the outbreak was spreading wildly and rapidly.”

The New York Times quoted Yale School of Public Health epidemiologist Nathan Grubaugh as saying that there was enough data showing that “New York was the primary gateway for the rest of the country.” New York has had 28,339 deaths as of May 18 afternoon and the US 90,236, according to JHU.

Could this toll have been smaller had the intelligence agencies had been watching Italy – and other European countries – instead of India?

(The writer, a non-resident senior fellow of Society for Policy Studies, is New York-based journalist. He can be contacted at arullouis@spsindia.in and followed on Twitter @arulouis)