Donald Trump Won't Take Drastic Measures To Fight Coronavirus; Should US Citizens Be Concerned?

Donald Trump does not believe that the global death rate from COVID-19 is 3.4%. On Wednesday night, the U.S. president said on live television that the World Health Organization’s (WHO) assessment was a “false number” and claimed that novel coronavirus patients could get better even without seeing a doctor.

“I think the 3.4% is really a false number,” he said. “Now, this is just my hunch. 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 added.

Donald Trump said the 3.4% assessment of the WHO was a “very high number,” adding the death rate from COVID-19 could be just a fraction of 1%. “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 number is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1%,” he surmised.

While many received Trump’s claims with raised eyebrows, a Harvard doctor actually concurred with him and said the mortality rate from the disease could be lower than WHO’s current estimates. According to Harvard Medical School instructor Dr. Jeremy Samuel Faust, the true coronavirus mortality rate could be less than 1 percent, not very far from the death rate from common influenza.

Faust said the statistics from the Diamond Princess ship is a better basis than global statistics when gauging how fatal COVID-19 is. It can be recalled that the Diamond Princess was put on quarantine for an indefinite time after one of its passengers was confirmed to have been infected with the coronavirus. Of the 3,711 onboard, 705 caught the virus and six died, resulting in about 0.85% fatality rate.

Meanwhile, Trump also said during the live broadcast that the Democrats were taking advantage of the coronavirus outbreak to demonize him. “The Democrats weaponized the virus against the Trump administration,” he said. “No matter how good you do, if you found a cure and everything disappeared in 24 hours, they’d say you did a terrible job. But here I am in the White House. I’m president and they’re not,” he added.