Donald Trump said COVID is NOT the flu at the end his news conference today ... Note, BOLDED, but I quote at length for context ...
"We are in a war. This is a World War II. This is a World War I, where by the way, the war essentially ended because of a plague. That was one of the worst ever. They lost almost a hundred million people. But we’re in a big war. And I’ll say one thing about, because I think it’s important, the last person, I did it early, but I was the last person that wanted to close down one of the great economic, you can’t call it an experiment, but everything I guess in life is an experiment. So let’s say experiments, but one of the great economic stories in history, I’m the last person that wanted to do it, but we did the right thing, because if we didn’t do it, you would’ve had a million people, a million and a half people, maybe two million people dead.
Now we’re going toward 50, I’m hearing, or 60,000 people. One is too many. I always say it. One is too many, but we’re going toward 50 or 60,000 people. That’s at the lower, as you know, the low number was supposed to be 100,000 people. We could end up at 50 to 60. Okay, it’s horrible. If we didn’t do what we did, we would have had, I think, a million people, maybe 2 million people, maybe more than that. And you look it, there’s one country in particular that decided let’s wing it. Let’s just keep going. They are being inundated with death.
Now if you take a look at some of the hospitals, where one of them I knew growing up in Queens, and I’m looking at the bodies laying in hallways being brought into refrigerator trucks, the trucks, these massive trucks, bodies going in, multiply that times 10. It’s not sustainable. And many of the people that have this theory, Oh let’s, you know, maybe we could have just gone right through. I was somebody that would have loved to have done that, but it wouldn’t have been sustainable. You can’t lose a million people. That’s almost double what we lost in the Civil War. I use that as a guide, Civil War, 600,000 people died. So it’s not sustainable.
But it could have been much more than a million people. I mean if you took a number and cut it in half and half and in half again, you’d end up at 500,000 people, okay, if you want to make a very conservative guesstimate. 500,000 people is not acceptable. Is that a correct sort of an analogy? So I mean I see it all the time. My friends of mine, people that I have great respect for. Well we could have done this, we could have done, and remember this, when we say 50 and they compare 50 to the 35 of the flu, because it’s averaged 35, 36,000 over a 10 year period. It’s a lot. Who would think that?
But we’re not talking about with the flu. It just goes. We’re not locking ourselves in our units. We’re not locking ourselves in our apartments and not moving and not touching anybody and just saying, you know, the world. In this case we are, and we’re still going to lose between 50 and 60, but if we just kept it going on a normal basis, which is really the only standard that you can compare it to with the flu, because that was a normal basis. You get into an airplane, you travel to Florida, you go to Texas, you go wherever you’re going. But in this case, if we didn’t do anything, the number wouldn’t be 50 to 60,000, the number would be a million people dead. It would be 1,000,005, 1,000,002, maybe 700,000. It would have been a number in like that, and it’s so important because I see so much.
Oh well, you know. You can’t compare it because I’ll tell you what, the people of this country, what they’ve done, they’ve gone out of their had the way they’ve lived. It’s not great. It’s terrible. Maybe the first three days, they’re all of a sudden, you see what’s going on. They want to get going, and I get that fully. But I just say this. If we would have done that, we would’ve lost anywhere from a million to more than two million people. Now, with all of the death that we’ve seen at 50 or 60,000 people heading toward, right now it’s at 40, but 50 or 60,000 people, probably over 54, and [inaudible 01:38:37], but that’s with our guard up. If we took our guard down and just said, “Okay, we’re just going to keep this open,” we would have lost millions of people.