The Jan 29 memo set out two stark choices “Aggressive Containment versus No Containment.”

Navarro compared cost estimates for the choices and wrote that the Council of Economic Advisers’ estimates for stopping travel from China to the U.S. would be $2.9 billion per month. If the virus turned out to be a pandemic, that travel ban could extend 12 months and cost the U.S. $34.6 billion.

Doing nothing (the “No Containment” option) could range from “zero economic costs” to $5.7 trillion depending on the lethality of the virus.

On the high end, he estimated a scenario in which the coronavirus could kill 543,000 Americans.