Every word Donald Trump speaks is best ignored when sizing up the dangers of COVID-19

The stupidity just keeps coming.

Hours after leaving the hospital on Monday of last week, President Trump tweeted that COVID-19 is “far less lethal” than the flu for “most populations.”

This is not true.

Two days later, he bragged that he probably would have bounced back from the virus even if he had not been treated with powerful drugs.

Doctors might disagree.

On Saturday, he claimed the virus is “disappearing.”

It is not. It is surging.

On Monday of this week, he held a rally in Florida at which nobody was asked to wear a mask.

It was your basic super-spreader.

And now, according to reports on Wednesday, Trump is keen on the idea of just letting the virus spread naturally among younger people so as to achieve “herd immunity” through infections rather than a vaccine.

The World Health Organization calls that approach “unethical.” Millions more people might die.

COVID-19 and a dishonest president

It is astounding that 10 months into the pandemic, the president of the United States continues to downplay the danger of COVID-19 — at least in public — dismissing it as a kind of flu, even as the virus has killed more than 1 million people worldwide, including more than 215,000 people in the United States.

No matter that aides in the White House, discouraged from wearing masks, are falling ill left and right.

No matter that Trump himself recovered from COVID-19 only after receiving an extraordinary level of medical care that most Americans can only dream of.

No matter that he was damn lucky.

Donald Trump just lies, over and over again, when it comes to COVID-19. He is best ignored.

Reasonable people can disagree about the best response to the pandemic — whether or not, for example, to close schools, prohibit indoor restaurant dining or large outdoor gatherings. There’s much to be said for the argument that “the cure can’t be worse than the disease.”

But there is no disputing — we can’t say this strongly enough — the very real and continuing dangers of the disease.

COVID-19 versus the flu

So far already this year, more Americans have died from the coronavirus than died from the flu in all of the past five years combined, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The number of flu deaths in the United States varies greatly from year to year, but generally fluctuates between from 12,000 to 61,000.

The death rate of COVID-19 is substantially higher than that of most strains of the flu, possibly 10 or even 20 times higher. Johns Hopkins University currently estimates the death rate for the coronavirus to be 2.8%, while the death rate for the flu is only about 0.1%.

And, unlike the flu, there is as yet no vaccine for the coronavirus.

COVID-19 and young people

Younger Americans are much less likely to become seriously ill from COVID-19, but among those who do reach the point of hospitalization, their risks are substantial.

A new Harvard study of 3,222 young adults — ages 18 to 24 — who were hospitalized for COVID-19 found that a sizable number of them — 21% — required intensive care. Ten percent required mechanical ventilation and 2.7% died. Those percentages doubled for young adults who suffered from hypertension or were morbidly obese.

The message is that COVID-19 “does not spare young people” and is “a life-threatening disease in people of all ages,” wrote an editor of JAMA Internal Medicine, which published the study in September.

COVID-19 and herd immunity

The Washington Post first reported Wednesday that officials in the White House favor a plan to let the coronavirus spread freely among healthy young people — no masks or social distancing — to hasten the arrival of herd immunity. At that point, enough people would be immune to the virus to prevent its spread at epidemic rates.

The fundamental flaw in that approach is that while younger people face less danger from the disease, nobody has a plan for how to segregate them from the rest of us — their parents, grandparents, gray-haired neighbors, older store clerks and the like.

In states where bars catering to young people were allowed to reopen early, such as Florida, death rates from the virus spiked weeks later. Sweden, which took a similarly casual approach, has seen significantly more deaths than neighboring countries, while its economy still has suffered.

But the best example of the lethal price demanded of the herd immunity approach might be the 50 million people worldwide who perished during the 1918 influenza pandemic.

COVID-19 and winter

The coronavirus is surging again in Europe, as summer lockdowns have been eased, and health experts fear it will spread faster now within families as cold weather forces us indoors.

“Put your guard back up, not only in the public places but in your private places, including your home,” Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said at a press briefing last Friday. “That community spread is now occurring in small gatherings, day after day, in households and families.”

That’s a not a welcome message as we head into the holiday season.

But, unlike the blatherings of Birx’s boss, Donald Trump, it’s the honest truth.

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