Trump Implied Obama Failed H1N1 Crisis Over 13,000 Deaths — But Fauci Predicts COVID-19 Could Bring More Than 15 Times That Number

In defending his administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic earlier this month, President Donald Trump brought forward an unusual comparison, implying that his predecessor had done a worse job than him during a separate viral outbreak.

Speaking with Sean Hannity during an interview on Fox News on March 4, Trump claimed that the swine flu (H1N1) resulted in 17,000 deaths across the country — a result that came about, Trump suggested, because former President Barack Obama “didn’t do anything” to contain the disease. (His numbers were off — there were about 13,000 deaths as a result of the swine flu.)

Trump’s comments were examined by a number of different fact-checking sites, and were found to be obscenely false. The Obama administration, these sites concluded, had responded appropriately to the H1N1 pandemic. Indeed, the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology in August 2009 predicted between 30,000 and 90,000 were going to die from the disease,  a range that is many times larger than the actual outcome, all things considered.

Trump used the numbers to demonstrate that his administration was doing a better job than Obama’s had — but it was an apples-to-oranges comparison, as it was looking at Obama’s record at the end of a crisis, and comparing it to Trump’s at the beginning of his.

In all likelihood, Trump’s final tally is going to be grimmer.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the president’s coronavirus task force, spoke on Sunday morning on CNN’s “State of the Union.” When asked about what outcome the crisis could have, Fauci warned that his predictions were based on models he had observed, and that they could be different in the end.

However, he also said the American public should be prepared for a high number of Americans getting sick, and dying, from COVID-19.

“Looking at what we’re seeing now, you know, I would say between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths” will occur as a result of coronavirus, coming about from “millions of cases” in total across the country, Fauci explained.

As of Sunday morning, there have been nearly 2,200 documented deaths in the United States as a result of coronavirus. Experts agree that the number is going to go up significantly in the coming weeks.

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Chris Walker

Chris Walker is a freelance journalist based in Madison, Wisconsin, who focuses on news, politics, and analysis of world events. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, since 2005 Chris has reported on workers' rights protests in Wisconsin, opined on four separate presidential elections and written on a number of other political subjects for a variety of national online publications.

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