‘This is just my hunch’, president says on
Fox News and then plucked his own surmising of a death rate out of the airDonald Trump declared live on television on Wednesday night that he did not believe the World Health Organization’s assessment of the global death rate from coronavirus of 3.4%.“I think the 3.4% is really a false number,” he told
Sean Hannity, one of his favorite conservative Fox News hosts, in a phone interview broadcast live.“Now, this is just my hunch,” Trump began, before continuing that “based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this, because a lot of people will have this, and it’s very mild – they’ll get better very rapidly, they don’t even see a doctor, they don’t even call a doctor.”He went on: “You never hear about those people, so you can’t put them down in the category of the overall population, in terms of this corona flu, and/or virus. So you just can’t do that.”> Trump to Hannity on WHO saying coronavirus death rate is 3.4%: "I think the 3.4% number is really a false number. Now this is just my hunch, but based on a lot of conversations ... personally, I'd say the number is way under 1%." > > Astoundingly irresponsible. pic.twitter.com/uC9c03zX31> > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 5, 2020He then plucked his own surmising of a likely death rate out of the air.“You know, all of a sudden it seems like 3 or 4%, which is a very high number, as opposed to a fraction of 1%,” he said, perhaps referring to the typical death rate for influenza, which is below one 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 that number is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1%,” Trump said.As the number of coronavirus cases begins to swell in the
United States, conservative media outlets have been dedicating hours of airtime to slamming
Democrats and mainstream media outlets such as the
New York Times and
CNN for being critical of
Donald Trump and his response to the coronavirus.For days, Trump’s allies in rightwing media have defended the president and his response to coronavirus, supporting the administration’s narrative that Democrats are using the coronavirus to further their own political agenda by purposefully exaggerating the severity of coronavirus just to blame Trump for it.Peter Hegseth, a co-host of Fox &
Friends Weekends, admonished Democrats’ criticism, saying: “They’re rooting for the coronavirus to spread. They’re rooting for it to grow. They’re rooting for the problem to get worse.”“They’re probably jumping for joy,” Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt said about the Democrats’ reaction to stock markets dropping.Trump also appeared to reject his own administration’s advice for people feeling unwell to stay at home. He said: “If 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’ve had in the state of
Washington, like you had one in
California, I believe you had one in New York.”There have been no deaths from coronavirus in New York.On Thursday morning, the president hit back via
Twitter on his comments relating to going to work.> I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work. This is just more Fake News and disinformation put out by the Democrats, in particular MSDNC. Comcast covers the CoronaVirus situation horribly, only looking to do harm to the incredible & successful effort being made!> > — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 5, 2020Shortly afterwards on Thursday morning, New York city mayor Bill De Blasio announced there were two more confirmed cases of coronavirus, brining the number of sufferers in the state to 13.