Ringo H.W. Chiu/Associated Press SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly downplayed the coronavirus outbreak’s severity.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told employees in an email that they’re more likely to be killed in a car accident than by the coronavirus, Buzzfeed reported Friday.

Musk said the evidence he’d seen showed the virus wasn’t among the 100 biggest health risks in the US, according to Buzzfeed.

SpaceX employees were told to stay home if they feel sick, while Tesla has offered limited time off, pay, and remote work options for employees.

Musk has repeatedly downplayed the severity of the COVID-19 outbreak, tweeting last week that “the coronavirus panic is dumb.”

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Elon Musk told his SpaceX employees in an email Friday that their risk of dying from COVID-19 is way lower than it is from being killed in a car accident, Buzzfeed reported.

“As a basis for comparison, the risk of death from C19 is *vastly* less than the risk of death from driving your car home,” Musk wrote, adding that the evidence he’s seen about the severity of the outbreak “suggests that this is *not* within the top 100 health risks in the United States,” according to Buzzfeed.

This isn’t the first time Musk, who’s the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla, has weighed in on the topic. Last week, he tweeted that “the coronavirus panic is dumb.”

Musk’s comments run counter to what most medical experts are saying, however. A panel of experts at the University of California, San Francisco, predicted this week that between 40% and 70% of Americans would become infected within the next 18 months. An internist in attendance, estimated from that range that up to 1.5 million could die, a number he said the panelists did not dispute.

Musk advised SpaceX employees in the email to stay home if they felt sick, but also cited a variety of factors that he believed indicated that the virus’ spread had been overstated.

Tesla employees were also instructed this week to stay home if they felt sick or had been in contact with someone with the virus, according to an internal memo seen by Business Insider. Those able to work remotely with managerial approval will be paid regularly, while salaried employees who couldn’t will be able to ask their supervisors for “Flexible Time Off,” the memo said. Hourly employees who can’t work from home, meanwhile, will be paid their base pay for 12 hours for every regularly scheduled workday that they’re in quarantine.

Musk’s comments came the same day President Trump, after weeks of downplaying the coronavirus outbreak himself, declared it a national emergency, and as the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continues to recommend that people minimise travel and visiting crowded public places, a practice known as “social distancing.”

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