We deal with stark figures, not “hunch”: CNN journo to Trump on coronavirus

US president Donald Trump’s casual rejection of the alarming mortality rate (3.4 per cent) of coronavirus and remark that people with the disease just get better by “sitting around and going to work,” during a telephonic interview with Fox News last week, has made him the butt of jokes and criticism worldwide.

The latest in the league to dispel Trump’s notions about the disease is CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr Sanjay Gupta.

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Expressing wonder on the US president’s advice to sick people to go to work when unwell, Gupta in a TV appearance on Thursday (March 5) said, “I mean, even without a coronavirus outbreak, people who are sick, who are showing symptoms like that shouldn’t be going to work. I mean, that’s how something like this spreads.”  He instead advised people to “stay at home” if they were infected.

Trump in the interview to Fox News’ Sean Hannity on March 4 had said that based on his “hunch,” he believed the 3.4 per cent death rate due to coronavirus, was a “false number” and that the actual mortality rate of the disease was just a fraction of one per cent. He had also said that after having “a lot of conversations with a lot of people,” he learned that, “we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work.”

“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 number is very high,” Trump said.

Reacting to Trump’s “hunch,” Gupta in a separate appearance on March 5, said while the president’s chooses to trust his hunch, people have to deal with real numbers.

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“Well, I mean… there is data… everyone has told him, and I know because I was at the briefing yesterday, we have to deal with real numbers,” he said.

Trump, who was pilloried for his remarks, which was construed as ill-informed and insensitive, in his defence tweeted on March 5 that he never said sick people should go to work, and blamed the Democrats for peddling “fake news” to defame him.