Every President faces unique challenges -- that's what being President is about. Being the person to face those unknown challenges, whatever they might be.
I'll be blunt: regardless of what we do or do not do, or did or did not do in the past, this virus was going to get to the US mainland and is going to spread.
The hope is that the strain of this virus that reaches the US mainland and becomes prevalent will face more of a pressure to leave its hosts relatively well than it will to reproduce as fast as it can in human cells (which causes more symptoms, and therefore more deaths in the most at-risk populations).
I wrote my Congresscritter (cuz he thinks his Ophthalmology training made him an expert in all things medical, so I figured I should write him and maybe he'd read it vs just ignore me) in support of home-based quarantine measures (aka self-quarantine) and a STRICT admonition about hygiene in quarantine facilities, when the number infected on the Diamond Princess was only at 10. And a request that any people repatriated from the DP who tested positive for the virus given priority in the best types of isolation we had available, as they were going to be the ones who essentially were the virus's petri dish.
And whether or not my advice helped or not, the symptomatic ones were sent to the Nebraska facility that had a "contacts" area quarantine for others who tested positive but were asymptomatic. That was a good idea, because the crowded conditions on the DP meant the virus likely went through multiple comparatively "easy" passage in human beings, compared to having to passed from people well enough to think they should be going out in public via chance aerosol droplets. The primary pressure through those serial transmissions was fast reproduction in human cells, not leaving the hosts well enough to go out and spread it unknowingly. That was our biggest risk for a "super-coronavirus".
The next biggest risk is if we start seeing positives in those we are keeping in any kind of physical quarantine that doesn't have the kind of protections the facility in Nebraska does. Most should have run out of their incubation period, and theoretically they should have been tested -- but tests and vaccines for novel viruses take time to manufacture and have limitations in supply and (as we've seen recently) efficacy in the field vs the designer's lab at first. I was clear that if we weren't testing those we kept in physical quarantine from Hubei province, we HAD to keep people isolated well enough from each other to not spread it within the facility.
But that's about all we can do. If we have 8000 citizens who might have been exposed through travel in one state, the absolute LAST thing we need to do is try to figure out a way to keep thousands of people isolated *together*. We do not need to recreate the military cantonments that spread the 1918 influenza out of fear of the same thing -- the cantonments, like any attempt at physically quarantining thousands of people would undoubtedly turn into, were petri dishes just like the cruise ship.
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