Trump says H1N1 death toll means Obama failed. Coronavirus death toll is much higher.
Over the course of a year, 12,469 people in the United States died from the H1N1 pandemic. The number of COVID-19 deaths is nearly double that in just six-and-a-half weeks.
Donald Trump on Monday said former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden’s response to the H1N1 pandemic in 2009 was a “tremendous failure,” pointing to the death toll from the influenza strain.
However, nearly double the number of people have already died from COVID-19 over the course of just a few weeks.
“Look, they had the H1N1, which is swine flu, and that was a big failure, that was a tremendous failure, they had a lot of failures,” Trump said at Monday’s daily coronavirus task force briefing.
“And you take a look at the history, and you know, 17,000 people died, and you talk about late, they were so late they were late like it never even existed, that was a big problem, it cause a lot of other people a big problem, too,” he added.
Trump’s death toll figure from the 2009 pandemic is wrong.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 12,469 people died from H1N1 over the course of a full year — from April 12, 2009, to April 10, 2010.
The death toll from COVID-19 is nearly double that in just six-and-a-half weeks, with at least 23,604 people dying from the disease since Feb. 29, according to the Washington Post.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projects that by Aug. 4, 68,841 people will have died from COVID-19. That’s 5.5 times more deaths than took place in one year of H1N1 — in just eight months.
Trump has long been trying to blame Obama — and now, by association, Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee in 2020 — for the COVID-19 pandemic.
In one example, Trump falsely said Obama left Trump with faulty tests — which is impossible as tests couldn’t have existed for a brand new virus.
Despite Trump’s claims, far more people will have died from COVID-19 than the flu outbreak that took place under Obama.
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
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