Iran Press/ America: Trump told Sean Hannity, one of his favorite conservative Fox News hosts, in a phone interview broadcast live on Wednesday night: “I think the 3.4% is really a false number. 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.”
He 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 well below 1%.
Trump said: “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%.”
Sources at the WHO pointed out to the Guardian that the 3.4% figure represented no more than a snapshot of the total number of reported deaths over the number of reported cases on the given day. “It’s not a mortality rate. But it is the math. The calculation on the given day.”
“Globally, about 3.4% of reported Covid-19 cases [the technical term for the novel coronavirus strain responsible for the outbreak] have died,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference on Tuesday.
The previous death rate had been given as an estimated 2% after the initial explosion of cases began in China. The new virus outbreak has been compared to the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 – 1919 when mortality was between 2 and 3% of those infected.
The death rate of those contracting seasonal influenza is typically an estimated 0.1%.
Donald Trump has also admitted that the coronavirus “might have an impact” on the US economy but said it would pass, according to a Reuters report.
The US president has previously sought to play down the effects of the outbreak and predicted last week that the US stock market would bounce back after losses last week.But asked at his first town hall meeting of the 2020 election season in Scranton, Pennsylvania if the outbreak would hurt the economy, he said:
"It certainly might have an impact. At the same time, I have to say people are now staying in the United States spending their money in the US, and I like that. It’s going to all work out. Everybody has to be calm. We have plans for every single possibility and I think that’s what we have to do. We hope it doesn’t last too long."
He dismissed criticism of his administration’s handling of the crisis.
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