In a phoner with Hannity on Wednesday night, Trump reacted to the World Health Organization's data-driven assessment of the global death rate for the novel coronavirus — 3.4% — by saying "I think the 3.4% is really a false number."
"Now, this is just my hunch," Trump said, which should have spurred Hannity to interrupt, but he didn't, so Trump continued, "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 -- 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 continued by discarding his own administration's advice to stay home if you're feeling sick: "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." No deaths have been reported in New York.
"You know," Trump said, "all of a sudden it seems like 3 or 4%, which is a very high number, as opposed to 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 that number is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1%." Hannity televised Trump's irresponsible "hunch" to the world...
