Coronavirus ‘truther’ Trump lies, endangering the public health

Donald Trump emerged from the fever swamps of right-wing conspiracy theory mongering. He was the leader of the racist “Obama Birther” conspiracy theory.

Trump was also an anti-vaxxer from way back. “In public statements going back more than a decade, Trump has alleged a connection — for which no evidence exists — between childhood vaccines and the onset of autism.” The powerful media mogul at the core of Trump’s debunked views on vaccines and autism (Bob Wright, the former chairman of NBCUniversal).

New research has found that Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 are particularly prone to anti-vaccination attitudes and that these attitudes can be exacerbated by the president’s tweets. The findings have been published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. See, New study finds Trump’s tweets intensify anti-vaccine attitudes among his supporters.

While the Trump campaign is hoping to rush a COVID-19 vaccine to market as an “October surprise” to try to save his flailing campaign, Beware a fraudulent ‘October vaccine surprise’ as Trump maneuvers to win re-election, Trump is constantly undermining his own government scientists and questioning the science behind their recommendations for the coronavirus pandemic. This will have a long-term negative impact on the public’s willingness to accept the science behind the very COVID-19 vaccine that Trump is hoping will save his flailing campaign. The COVID-19 Pandemic Exposes The Harm Of Denying Scientific Facts.

Over the July 4th holiday weekend, Trump continued to downplay the severity of the coronavirus pandemic as part of his repeated efforts to simply wish it away. Trump claimed that “99 percent of virus cases” are “totally harmless.”

The New York Times fact checker says Trump Falsely Claims ‘99 Percent’ of Virus Cases Are ‘Totally Harmless’:

President Trump dismissed the severity of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States over the weekend, downplaying the impact of the disease and saying that while the testing of tens of millions of American had identified many cases, “99 percent” of them were “totally harmless.”

His remarks about a virus that has already claimed nearly 130,000 lives were perplexing. The coronavirus is surging across the Sunbelt states and has rebounded in California. At least 2.8 million Americans have been infected, and public health officials have said the real number of infections may be 10 times higher.

No matter how you define harmless, most public health experts and respected coronavirus disease models would flatly contradict Mr. Trump’s assessment.

Experts say the president appears to have [cherry-picked] seized only on a death rate estimate of 1 percent or less that does not capture the entire impact of the disease, and excludes a multitude of thousands who have spent weeks in the hospital or weeks at home with mild to moderate symptoms that still caused debilitating health problems.

That death rate is narrowly focused on the number of people who die as a percentage of the total number of people affected — including those who are asymptomatic and do not experience any illness, and those with mild cases, who experience fleeting symptoms.

A crude calculation of the U.S. death rate, based on the total number of deaths officially attributed to the virus and the number of cases diagnosed through testing, suggests the mortality rate is higher, with 4.5 percent of those infected dying. But many experts agree that this rate is very likely inflated, because the denominator at this point in time has missed so many cases, including those who were never diagnosed because of testing shortages as well as those who were asymptomatic.

Studies that have calculated the death rate based on broader antibody testing that takes these silent cases into consideration suggest an infection death rate of less than 1 percent, said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.

On the other hand, new research says the number of deaths from COVID-19 is being undercounted.

Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University have published a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) which finds that the “official” recorded deaths from COVID-19 are woefully undercounting the true number of deaths due either directly or indirectly to the virus. See, Excess Deaths From COVID-19 and Other Causes, March-April 2020 (excerpt):

Results

Between March 1, 2020, and April 25, 2020, a total of 505, 059 deaths were reported in the US; 87, 001 (95% CI, 86, 578-87, 423) were excess deaths, of which 56 ,246 (65%) were attributed to COVID-19. In 14 states, more than 50% of excess deaths were attributed to underlying causes other than COVID-19; these included California (55% of excess deaths) and Texas (64% of excess deaths).

These estimates suggest that the number of COVID-19 deaths reported in the first weeks of the pandemic captured only two-thirds of excess deaths in the US. Potential explanations include delayed reporting of COVID-19 deaths and misattribution of COVID-19 deaths to other respiratory illnesses (eg, pneumonia) or to nonrespiratory causes reflecting complications of COVID-19 (eg, coagulopathy, myocarditis). Few excess deaths involved pneumonia or influenza as underlying causes.

The Associated Press fact checker also says Trump falsely says 99% of virus cases benign:

President Donald Trump is understating the danger of the coronavirus to people who get it, as more and more become infected in the U.S.

In his latest of many statements playing down the severity of the pandemic, Trump declared that 99% of cases of COVID-19 are harmless. That flies in the face of science and of the reality captured by the U.S. death toll of about 130,000. Trump also sounded a dismissive note about the need for breathing machines.

Throughout the pandemic, Trump has declared it under control in the U.S. when it hasn’t been.

TRUMP: “Now we have tested over 40 million people. But by so doing, we show cases, 99% of which are totally harmless.” — Fourth of July remarks Saturday.

THE FACTS: This statement does not reflect the suffering of millions of COVID-19 patients.

The World Health Organization, for one, has said about 20% of those diagnosed with COVID-19 progress to severe disease, including pneumonia and respiratory failure. Whatever the numbers turn out to be, it’s clear that the threat is not limited to the merest sliver of those who get the disease.

Aside from that, those with mild or no symptoms also can spread the virus to others who are more vulnerable.

Asked Sunday to defend Trump’s claim, Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn declined to do so. FDA Head Refuses To Address Trump Claim That 99% Of COVID-19 Cases Are ‘Totally Harmless’:

The head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration repeatedly refused to comment on President Donald Trump’s recent claim that 99% of coronavirus cases in the U.S. “are totally harmless,” despite data showing that the majority of people infected with the virus show symptoms of COVID-19.

Dr. Stephen Hahn — the commissioner of food and drugs who is also a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force — was asked about Trump’s latest claim in two separate interviews Sunday but refused to address it when asked.

The CDC estimated that only 35% of COVID-19 cases are asymptomatic, meaning that about two-thirds of the people who contract the virus show symptoms of it. Whether people with the virus are asymptomatic or not, they are still capable of infecting others, which could be considered harmful in itself.

Of the roughly 36 million people who have been tested for the virus in the U.S., nearly 3.3 million have tested positive, and nearly 130,000 have died, according to the CDC. It also reported that the overall cumulative COVID-19 hospitalization rate in the U.S. is 102.5 per 100,000 or about 0.1%.

Dr. Hahn’s failure to correct Trump’s disinformation, presumably out of the desire to protect his own job, is a failure of “first, do no harm” (attributed to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, it isn’t a part of the Hippocratic Oath at all. It is actually from another of his works called Of the Epidemics.) Hahn had an ethical obligation to correct this disinformation.

On Monday, Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, is “catapulting the propaganda,” as George W. Bush used to say. Trump, White House aide Mark Meadows downplay coronavirus risks even as governors rush to contain surging cases:

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows Monday defended President Donald Trump’s claim that 99% percent of coronavirus cases are “harmless” – an assertion at odds with a wide array of data on death rates, hospitalizations and studies on the impact of the disease.

Asked on Fox & Friends about Trump’s claim that 99% of coronavirus cases were “harmless,” Meadows responded: “when you look start to look at the stats and all the numbers that we have, the amount of testing that we have, the vast majority of people are safe from this.”

“Outside of comorbidities” like diabetes or hypertension, he added, the “risks are extremely low and the president’s right with that, and the facts and the statistics back us up there,” he said.

Large numbers of Americans have comorbidities that put them at higher risk for severe coronavirus cases. The CDC says over 100 million Americans live with diabetes or prediabetes, and nearly half of Americans have high blood pressure. The prevalence of such conditions is higher in racial minority groups, which have disproportionately affected by the coronavirus.

Stephen Ferrara, associate dean of clinical affairs at Columbia University, called Meadows’ comments “dangerous,” writing on Twitter that administration officials were “downplaying & intentional misleading of a public health crisis.”

More than 129,000 Americans have died as a result of the coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins University data, and coronavirus cases continue to rise across the country.

The fatality rate, or deaths divided by confirmed cases, is 4.5%, according to Johns Hopkins, though the death rate could vary and could be lower if cases are undercounted due to lack of testing. Over 38,000 people are currently hospitalized with the coronavirus, according to the COVID Tracking Project’s seven-day rolling average of hospitalizations.

Donald Trump and his administration are cherry-picking a mortality number to downplay the coronavirus pandemic, and to distract from their abject failure to prepare for and to address the coronavirus pandemic. The country is on the precipice of an apocalyptic humanitarian catastrophe in the coming weeks.

The rise in cases in Texas has left officials worried about the availability of intensive-care units. Austin Mayor Steve Adler told the Austin American-Statesman of the USA TODAY Network that Austin-area intensive care units could be overrun in the next two weeks if cases continue to climb in the region.

In other hospitals across America, there are similar scenes of crisis. HOSPITALS FACE ‘AN EXPLOSION OF COVID’ AND SIGNS OF ANOTHER SURGE AS CORONAVIRUS CASE NUMBERS CLIMB (excerpts):

Doctors in parts of Texas report waiting lists for their ICU beds, while others have had to decide which patients to admit, incapable of treating all those seeking help.

Among the states seeing an increase are Florida and Texas, which are expected to see nearly 2,000 new hospitalizations per day by mid-July, according to forecasts published by the CDC. In Arizona and California, the forecasts project about 1,500 new patients each day in the next two weeks.

At least 12 states are seeing a rise in daily hospitalizations, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this week.

The trend is worrying: A sharp increase in patients can once again overwhelm hospitals, putting critical resources including staffing, beds and ventilators in short supply.

The media should be focused on this impending disaster and not fall for Trump and his administration gaslighting the American public with this distraction of manipulating data to downplay the severity of the coronavirus pandemic.

Donald Trump is reckless and irresponsible and poses a significant public health threat to this country. This is how he should be treated and covered by the media.