Trump coronavirus comments called ‘a danger to public health’ after Fox News interview
Guidance from state and federal public health officials is clear: Anyone possibly exposed to the coronavirus should self-quarantine to prevent the spread of the disease.
Comments by President Donald Trump during a Fox News interview Wednesday night have been called “reckless” and “a danger to public health” after he contradicted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
During the phone interview with Sean Hannity, Trump questioned the fatality rate of the coronavirus and suggested infected people could still go to work.
“Well, I think the 3.4% is really a false number,” Trump said of the official mortality rate from the World Health Organization.
“Now, this is just my hunch, but 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,” he said.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom said this week: “Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected.”
Trump also contradicted public health advice from the CDC and state officials urging sick people to stay home.
“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,” he said.
The CDC says “employees who have symptoms of acute respiratory illness are recommended to stay home and not come to work until they are free of fever ... and any other symptoms for at least 24 hours, without the use of fever-reducing or other symptom-altering medicines (e.g. cough suppressants).”
“Employees should notify their supervisor and stay home if they are sick,” the CDC says.
Peter Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, said on Twitter, “It’s difficult to wrap your head around the fact that the president called into a TV show & made a series of statements during a pandemic directly contradicting public health advice. The mind boggles at how reckless & dangerous that is. People who follow his bad advice could die.”
NBC News analyst and former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner tweeted: “So Trump disagrees w/medical & scientific data from the World Health Organization regarding the fatality rate of the Coronavirus. Trump said infected people get better by just ‘sitting around’, ‘not going to the doctor’ & ‘even going to work.’ Trump is a danger to public health.“
Health officials with the CDC say more cases of coronavirus, called COVID-19, “are likely to be identified in the coming days, including more cases in the United States. It’s also likely that person-to-person spread will continue to occur, including in communities in the United States. It’s likely that at some point, widespread transmission of COVID-19 in the United States will occur.”
As of Wednesday, more than 93,000 cases of the coronavirus were reported around the world, and about 3,200 had died of the respiratory virus, according to the WHO. Eleven people have died in the United States.
This story was originally published March 5, 2020 at 7:51 AM with the headline "Trump coronavirus comments called ‘a danger to public health’ after Fox News interview."
