Interesting article, even though Sanlmar misumderstood your quote of me, erroneously believing that I was arguing that it wasn't in the US until January 19. (My post was saying that it was probably here well before that.)
So this article would strongly lead to the belief that COVID-19 was in the US in December, but China hadn't acknowledged the disease yet, and doctors/hospitals were likely mistaking it for a stubborn flu or a flu with complications.
Regarding whether this should be laid at Trump's feet, that's not so obvious. The reports given to Trump were regarding the safety of US military forces in China, NOT a potential pandemic which would spread to the US.
It's important to remember that COVID-19 is new territory for everyone. We've never seen anything like this before -- a disease both easily transmissible AND carrying severe/deadly symptoms. Anyone concluding in November that this was a huge threat to the US was either psychic or paranoid. It's easy to look back now and say, "We should've been prepared", but you have to be realistic, especially given the mountain of intel presented to the White House about various subjects each day. In some ways, this seems like Monday Morning Quarterbacking.
If you doubt me on this, tell me how much social distancing you were doing on February 1. At that point, you had MORE info about COVID-19 than Trump had in late November. Were you taking it seriously? Were you changing your lifestyle or daily habits? I doubt it. Let he who is without COVID-19 sin cast the first stone.
With that said, Trump did waste much of February somewhat in denial of the seriousness of the matter, and seemed more focused upon the Democratic attacks against him. To be fair, Democrats were indeed being unfair and trying to politicize this during February, but that's 2020 politics, and Trump should have ignored this and sprung into action. He didn't, and that was a big mistake.
It became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Democrats were hitting Trump with attacks that he was doing a horrible job, using a lot of unfair/untrue talking points. This caused Trump to obsess over the attacks instead of focusing on the coronavirus, which, in turn, caused him to do a lousy job in February. Not defending him at all for that (he should have tuned it out), but honestly that's what occurred.