"Back in March, I posted “The Top 10 Lies About President Trump’s Response to the Coronavirus.”
It’s been just over four months since that post and an update seems to be in order because the lies just haven’t stopped.
The media focused its attention on the coronavirus pandemic—after everything from the Russia collusion hoax to the bogus impeachment failed to oust President Trump.
The pandemic would be their Hail Mary.
Once they were no longer distracted by impeachment, the media began immediately to undermine public confidence in Trump’s response to the coronavirus, and continues to this day.
Below I present ten more lies to add to the list.
10. Obama did a better job with H1N1
The common refrain from the left when comparisons are made between the government’s responses to H1N1 and COVID-19 is that only 12,469 died from H1N1, according to the CDC. But this leaves out important context. The CDC estimates that in the United States alone between April 12, 2009, and April 10, 2010, there were nearly 61 million cases of H1N1.
Based on these numbers, H1N1 had a mortality rate of .02 percent. According to the CDC’s latest estimate, the coronavirus has an overall mortality rate of .4 percent for symptomatic cases (or .26 percent if you include asymptomatic cases) meaning that the coronavirus is 13-20 times more deadly than H1N1.
The coronavirus is not only magnitudes more deadly than H1N1, but also more infectious. According to a study from Emerging Infectious Diseases, COVID-19 has a median R0 value (a mathematical term for how contagious a disease is) of 5.7, while H1N1 had an R0 value between 1.4 and 1.6. So, COVID-19 is nearly four times more infectious and 13-20 times more deadly than H1N1.
Ron Klain, who was Biden’s chief of staff at the time and is currently advising his campaign, says it was mere luck that H1N1 wasn’t more deadly. “It is purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history,” Klain said of H1N1 in 2019. “It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It just had to do with luck. If anyone thinks that this can’t happen again, they don’t have to go back to 1918, they just have to go back to 2009, 2010, and imagine a virus with a different lethality, and you can just do the math on that.”
I did the math. If H1N1 had been as infectious as the coronavirus and had the same mortality rate as the coronavirus, there would have been 231 million infections (that’s 70 percent of the country) and 600,704 deaths. Based on Obama’s handling of H1N1, he would have botched coronavirus pandemic too.
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