President Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus in the press briefing room at the White House in Washington, Saturday, Feb. 29, 2020. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

The left is desperate to paint the Trump Administration’s response to the novel coronavirus (aka Covid-19) emergence as incompetent and malicious. Despite the administration getting praise from people who are actually familiar with the actions and issues (an no, your rando doctor or even medical school faculty is not qualified to comment because as Mike Ford pointed out, this is a logistics problem much more than a medical problem) the media has shown a willingness to lie to further their narrative. (SEE: New York Times Continues to Attempt to Weaponize Coronavirus By Just Lying About Testing.)

Here is an example of a big lie being told yesterday

This has been another edition of "When you give inaccurate information, you have a moral obligation to delete your tweet and give the correct information" pic.twitter.com/pmfkQbiWAw

— PoliMath (@politicalmath) March 4, 2020

Yesterday, President Trump was on Sean Hannity and they discussed the coronavirus along with other plagues afflicting the nation…like Joe Bidens’ candidacy. During the course of the interview this statement was made:

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.

Almost immediately, the anti-science left pounced. The best example of all the bullsh** being slung comes from the furry at Vox, Aaron Rupar. At least I think he’s a furry, otherwise he wears that Yorkie makeup for grins.

In this clip, Trump:
1. Denies WHO's coronavirus death rate based on “hunch"
2. Calls coronavirus "corona flu"
3. Suggests it's fine for people w/ Covid-19 to go to work
4. Compares coronavirus to "the regular flu," indicating he doesn't get the difference pic.twitter.com/uC9c03zX31

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 5, 2020

The WHO number is hugely inflated as a measure because it combines deaths in Third World areas, like most of China, to deaths in the United States. Writing in an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Fauci noted that very fact:

This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.

Notice how Trump’s estimate of mortality tracks exactly with the NEJM editorial?

And Rupar and others are simply telling a blatant lie about Trump saying it was okay to go to work. He doesn’t say that at all. He says people may have such mild symptoms that they go to work.Many, if not the overwhelming majority, of people acquiring coronavirus will have symptoms that are extraordinarily mild. A large number will be asymptomatic. As the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci pointed out in testimony to a Senate committee on Tuesday, there have been no confirmed cases is children under 15. This doesn’t mean they can’t spread it, it just means they don’t even know they are sick.

Except Trump literally said on live national television with Sean Hannity on Fox News that thousands of people with the coronavirus can get better by “sitting around” or “just going to work, some of them go to work.” Trump blatantly lies even when he’s recorded saying it. pic.twitter.com/S7qULm9V96

— Eugene Gu, MD (@eugenegu) March 5, 2020

This clown shows that slapping an M.D. after your name doesn’t make you smart or honest. He criticizes Trump for saying what is absolutely true. As there is no vaccine, they only way you will get well is by literally “sitting around.” Pretty much like how you get over the flu or a cold.

It’s like liberals hate President Trump so much they can’t even understand plain English.

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) March 5, 2020

The left is desperate. They were counting on coronavirus tanking the economy and on using the response by the Administration as a weapon. The response, so far, has been on target. The markets are beginning to price in disruption of the supply chain to China and alternative suppliers are being found or developed. Odds are by mid-summer people will be looking back on this as the medical equivalent of the Y2K panic.