Where were the Progressives as the pandemic broke?

When I consider the shortlist of culpable parties, the unquestionably correct ranking of who deserves the most blame for the current pandemic is:  #1. the CCP,  #2. the FDA, and #3. the White House.  (No, that is not an absolution of Trump -- there is more than enough blame to go around.)

What really stumps me is how does Progressive America fit in here?  By construction, the party out of power has less responsibility.  But thinking about their role in the crisis, the Democratic Party seems almost...irrelevant.  To my knowledge, there were no left-leaning figures in Congress sounding alarms in February.  We had three primary debates between January 14th and February 19th without a mention of the coronavirus.  (It finally got a passing shoutout at the South Carolina debate on February 25th.)  Progressive news outlets routinely downplayed the threat of the virus.  Anecdotally, I socialize pretty much exclusively with extremely intelligent Democrats and progressives, very few of whom took the coronavirus seriously until March.

Progressives are obsessively focused on the tail risks associated with global warming; why did so many miss the pandemic?  I don't really have a good answer, but am memorializing some observations:

• The outbreak overlapped with the impeachment trial and the presidential primary, so perhaps these crowded out attention that otherwise would have been engaged by the coronavirus.
• Perhaps progressives have over-learned from 9/11, and are now too skeptical about alarmism over foreign threats.
• At the outset, the best chance of limiting the outbreak was by limiting travel, and that is a right that is too near-and-dear to progressive values.
• From casual conversation, the progressives I know are willing to acknowledge the FDA and CDC failures when pressed (so that is a win), but they don't really want to talk about it.  Instead, they prefer hobby-horses about suspicious trading activity and Trump's cutting a bureaucratic pandemic response department within White House that (unlike the aforementioned bureaucracies) would have done more good than harm.  Is the dominant progressive approach to understanding the world actually pretty rigid?
• This is at least in part confirmation of my thesis from three years ago that Trump would make progressives dumber.