Donald Trump's Latest Tweet On Coronavirus Might Be His Dumbest Yet
You may only be allowed 280 characters, but it is often mind-blowing how much incorrect information a person can fit into one tweet.
Take the president of the United States for example, who on Thursday managed to completely misunderstand numbers, the nature of disease and how the media works all in one remarkable post on Twitter.
Referring to the skyrocketing number of coronavirus case currently ripping through the United States, Donald Trump said:
For the 1/100th time, the reason we show so many Cases, compared to other countries that haven’t done nearly as well as we have, is that our TESTING is much bigger and better. We have tested 40,000,000 people. If we did 20,000,000 instead, Cases would be half, etc. NOT REPORTED!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2020
There’s a lot going on here so let’s break it down.
‘Cases would be half’
Let’s set aside the seemingly random capitalisation of “cases” and concentrate on what he’s actually suggesting here.
First, some context.
More than 132,000 Americans have died of the disease, already the highest number in the world and all the signs are pointing to the situation rapidly deteriorating in the very near future.
According to a Reuters analysis, coronavirus cases have been on the rise in 42 of the 50 states over the past two weeks.
On Tuesday, the number of confirmed US cases crossed the 3 million mark, roughly equivalent to 1% of the country’s population and about 25% of all known infections worldwide.
And the number of new fatalities is ticking upwards as the lag time between when a person catches the disease and dies from it passes.
Trump is right to say that if they did half the testing they would have half the number of confirmed cases, but the number of infected people in the US would be the same.
Arguably, it would get much higher much quicker as without accurate data to inform the response, authorities won’t be able to react as they need to.
