FactChecking Trump’s Coronavirus Press Conference

tulc

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FactChecking Trump's Coronavirus Press Conference
Facing a declining stock market and criticism from Democrats, President Donald Trump and other officials have minimized the risks of the coronavirus to the U.S. and given inaccurate and misleading information about the new virus.

  • Trump said the current number of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. is “going very substantially down, not up.” But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said to expect more cases and has warned that it is highly unlikely that the virus will not spread to some degree within the U.S. The first case of community spread may have already occurred.
  • Economic adviser Larry Kudlow also misled on the potential for the virus to spread within the U.S., saying in a television interview, “We have contained this,” and “t’s pretty close to airtight.”
    [*]The president said that the U.S. is “rapidly developing a vaccine” for COVID-19 and “will essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.” That’s misleading. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said a vaccine at best won’t be ready for “a year to a year-and-a-half” and won’t be available for the current epidemic.
    [*]So far, the fatality rate for COVID-19 has been about 2-3%, higher than the influenza fatality rate in the United States of about 0.1%. But in talking about those rates, the president made confusing remarks that left a false impression that “the flu is much higher” than the coronavirus rate.
    [*]Trump’s acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, falsely claimed this week that the influenza fatality rate was “right around 2% as well.” It’s not.
    [*]In making a comparison to a past outbreak, the president correctly noted that Ebola is far more deadly than the novel coronavirus. But he neglected to mention that Ebola can only be transmitted via bodily fluids and is harder to catch.


tulc(thought this might be of interest) :wave:
 
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tulc

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So Trump was telling the truth.
Well...he did successfully identify which one was vice President Pence and he was right that ebola is more deadly than the virus. Other than those things he was pretty much either wrong, incoherent or drifting off the subject. :sorry:
tulc(is drinking some very good coffee) :coffee:
 
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HTacianas

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Well...he did successfully identify which one was vice President Pence and he was right that ebola is more deadly than the virus. Other than those things he was pretty much either wrong, incoherent or drifting off the subject. :sorry:
tulc(is drinking some very good coffee) :coffee:

Well there's nothing in your post contradicting anything he said. You normally aren't that kind to Trump.
 
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Halbhh

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Well there's nothing in your post contradicting anything he said. You normally aren't that kind to Trump.
What? You're serious? You didn't read it then.
 
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The Righterzpen

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I think his remarks would be confusing to people who don't really know what's going on. Most people have no knowledge whatsoever of this thing.

I started following and looking into it a month ago; when one of the citizen journalists I follow on YouTube started covering it. (She also covers Q stuff.) After the 1st week of February; I decided it's time to start preparing and so I've been "prepping" now for a month.

Trump did do a lot of "maybe", "who knows", "we'll see". Which would give him a "back door" that if this does get really bad; he didn't say specifically that it wouldn't. He did say he agreed with the CDC that communities, schools, medical centers, and every day citizens need to "dust off their pandemic response plans".

Personally, I think he was a little too optimistic about the US having a handle on this. But if you don't know anything about the R0 of this virus; (it's very contagious) it's real easy to think everything is "OK".

Covid-19's "natural" R0 factor is 6. The flu's is 1.6. R0 factor is determined by not only how it's spread; this virus is "aerosol born", which spreads further than "droplet". And how long it survives on a surface still infectious, isn't really well known either. Things such as "herd immunity", vaccines, medications, physical buriers like oceans; drop an R0 factor. Decontaminating things like people, supplies, streets, shops, busses, trains etc. will also drop an R0 factor.

But... this is a "novel" (new) virus. There's no "herd immunity", there's no treatment, there's no vaccine. People getting on airplanes has eliminated "stop gap buriers" like oceans. So the only way to try and control its spread is quarantine. Quarantine will slow it down, but it won't stop it. The measure in attempting to slow it's spread is to keep it from overwhelming the medical infrastructure. Once the medial establishment is overwhelmed; the mortality rate jumps.

Even with the draconian measures the Chinese government is enforcing on its people; they've only been able to get the R0 factor down to about 2 to 3. Once there's "community spread" (Which there is now. US just reported its first "community spread" case.) This thing is not going to be contained without quarantines.

People like to compare this to the flu; but it's not the.... F-ing flu! The flu has a mortality rate in the US of 0.1%. 0.1 X 10=1%. Covid-19's mortality rate under tightly controlled circumstances is 3%. (That's 30X deadlier than the flu.) Its mortality rate jumps though if the health care system becomes overwhelmed. (Which is what happened in Wuhan.)

Right now, Iran's reported "suspected" cases to death rate is at 10%. WHO says that's because the Iranian authorities are missing the less severe cases and that they have a greater number of infected people than they are counting. I don't know if that's true or not.

The "unofficial" story coming out of Iran from Iranian doctors is that their medical infrastructure is already swamped. (Same thing happened in China.) The Iranian central governmental authorities aren't doing anything to attempt to contain this though. Some towns and cities have closed schools and told people to stay home; but there are no enforced quarantines; which now in about two weeks, they've spread this across the rest of the middle-east.

Same thing happened with Italy. Even though Italy quarantined the affected towns; it's spreading across Europe now.

This virus has anywhere from a two to four week incubation period; and you can catch it again, even after you've had it once already. So this is why "all the sudden" all these outbreaks are happening. Now will it get as bad in the US as it is in China? That will depend on the behavior of us individual citizens. Stay home. Stay out of malls, movie theaters, coffee shops. Expect schools to be closed. Expect businesses to get shut down. If you live in a zone that gets quarantined; don't expect to be able to leave. China has more than a billion people. 7 hundred million of them are under lockdown. That's more than half the country's population. The US (upon last census) had 300 million people.

"Projected pandemic infection rate" in the US could hit 60%. That's what it is in China right now; even with everything they are doing to contain it. 60% of the US population is 180 million people. If only 3% die of this, that's still 5,400,000 people. The annual death rate from flu in the US is about 64,000.

Now roughly 15% of people who catch this need hospital care. That's 27 million people. Last year 40 million people were admitted to hospitals. So if this ends up being the infection rate; this means the American medical establishment would have to increase it's capacity by 80% to accommodate those kinds of numbers to keep from getting overwhelmed.

So again, this depends on us. Wash your hands and stay home.
 
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