On the same day that the World Health Organization (WHO) pegged the global death rate of the novel coronavirus at 3.4 percent — a figure higher than earlier estimates — President Donald Trump went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and insisted it’s actually not that bad.
As cases spread across the United States (in part because of expanding testing) and states declare public health emergencies, Trump cited a “hunch” to make a case that the mortality rate is actually “a fraction of 1 percent.” He recklessly dismissed the WHO mortality rate as “really a false number,” used bogus numbers to compare the coronavirus to the much less deadly seasonal flu, and didn’t discourage people with Covid-19 (the disease caused by coronavirus) from going to work.
It was a blizzard of dangerous, irresponsible misinformation, all delivered within a span of just over two minutes. Hannity responded not by challenging the president, but by quickly changing the topic.
I think the 3.4 percent [number] is really a false number. Now, this is just my hunch, but based on and lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this, because a lot of people will have this and it is very mild. They will get better very rapidly, they don’t even see a doctor or call doctor, you never hear about those people so you can’t put them down in the category, in overall population in terms of this corona flu, or virus. So you just can’t do that.
So if, you know, we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work, some of them go to work, but they get better and then, when you do have a death like you had in the state of Washington, like you had one in California, I believe you had one in New York, you know, all of a sudden it seems like 3 or 4 percent, which is a very high number, as opposed to a fraction of 1 percent.
But again, they don’t know about the easy cases because the easy cases don’t go to the hospital, they don’t report to doctors or the hospital in many cases so I think that [the WHO] number is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1 percent.
Now, with the regular flu, we average from 27,000 to 77,000 deaths a year. Who would think that? I never knew that until six or eight weeks ago, I asked that question, I said, ‘How many people die of the flu?’ You know, you keep hearing about ‘flu shot, flu shot, take your flu shot,’ but how many people die of the flu? And they said, ‘sir, we lose between 27,000 and, you know, somewhere in the 70s’ — I think we went as high as 100,000 people died in 1990, if you can believe that, but a lot much people regardless. I think it averages about 36,000 people a year. So I said, ‘Wow, that is a percentage that is under 1 percent, very substantially.’ So it’d be interesting to see what difference is but again, a lot of people don’t report.
This is what happens when you put a narcissistic imbecile in the White House.
Keep in mind that he has been schooled over and over and over again the last couple of weeks about this virus and the danger involved and he just can’t get it. All he cares about is downplaying the danger so it doesn’t affect the stock market and his re-election. And the result is that he has failed miserably to deal with this crisis and has let it spread unabated despite having weeks of lead time to get prepared.
And he’s still doing it. Because he’s a vindictive ignoramus and will punish anyone who doesn’t lick his boots, everyone in the public health apparatus of the United States government is having to downplay the risk in ways that go beyond simply telling people not to panic. They have to say that everything’s going great and fluff the president for his “great leadership.”