Fact Checking 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 “[I]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.

The president made these claims in a February 26, 2020 press conference, in which he said Vice President Mike Pence would lead the administration’s response to the coronavirus outbreak. Wolf and Kudlow, who is now a member of the administration’s coronavirus task force, spoke earlier this week.

Cases ‘Close to Zero’ Within Days?
Trump repeatedly downplayed the potential for more COVID-19 cases in the U.S., and even suggested, falsely, that the number of American cases would fall.

Referencing the 15 known cases detected in the U.S. at the time of the press conference — a tally that does not include an additional 45 repatriation cases — Trump said, “the 15, within a couple of days, is going to be down to close to zero. That’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”