On Tuesday, one day after the Dow Jones had its worst day in two years on coronavirus fears, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Americans that it is all but a certainty that the deadly virus will spread throughout the United States. “It’s not so much of a question of if this will happen in this country any more but a question of when this will happen,” said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. “We are asking the American public to prepare for the expectation that this might be bad,” she added ominously. One person who isn’t worried in the slightest? Noted infectious disease scholar Donald Trump, who claimed from India that this whole thing is totally under control, because China—long known for transparency on matters that could embarrass its government—told him so.

“China is working very, very hard. I have spoken to President Xi, and they are working very hard,” Trump explained at a business roundtable at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi. “If you know anything about him, I think he will be in pretty good shape. They have had a rough patch, but now it looks like they are getting it more and more under control. I think that is a problem that is going to go away.” Trump also downplayed the possibility of the virus having an economic impact in the United States, presumably in part because a hit to the economy would hurt his reelection chances. “It was an outside source which nobody would have predicted six months or three months ago,” he said. “Nobody would have ever predicted [it], but let’s see; I think it is going to be under control…. We do business with a lot of other countries and we take care. We want other countries to be happy, healthy, and well. They’ve got to be happy, healthy, and well. That is very simple.”

While we would never suggest that the president has no earthly idea what he’s talking about when it comes to the coronavirus, his insistence that it’s nothing to get worked up about and, really, is much ado about nothing doesn’t exactly square away with that pesky thing called reality. Although the pace of new cases in mainland China, which were clocking in at more than 2,000 a day as a of a month ago, has slowed, the rapid expansion of confirmed cases in South Korea, Iran, and Italy has suggested a near pandemic. In addition, World Health Organization officials have warned that a spike in infections could overwhelm medical resources in many countries, and, crucially, that new cases could resurge in China as people go back to work. (There’s also the matter, per the New York Times, of “persistent doubts about the accuracy of infection figures reported by China’s government, raising the possibility that the true magnitude of the outbreak remains underreported.”)

But hey, maybe we’re being too hard on Dr. Trump. One person who totally backs the president’s assessment and then some? Recent Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh, who told his listeners on Monday, “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump.“ He added: “Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus...The coronavirus is the common cold, folks. The Drive-By Media hype of this thing as a pandemic, as the Andromeda strain, as, ‘Oh, my God, if you get it, you’re dead’...I think the survival rate is 98%. Ninety-eight percent of people get the coronavirus survive. It’s a respiratory system virus. It probably is a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized…. I believe the way it’s being weaponized is by virtue of the media, and I think that it is an effort to bring down Trump, and one of the ways it’s being used to do this is to scare the investors, to scare people in business. It’s to scare people into not buying Treasury bills at auctions. It’s to scare people into leaving, cashing out of the stock market—and sure enough, as the show began today, the stock market—the Dow Jones Industrial Average—was down about 900 points, supposedly because of the latest news about the spread of the coronavirus.”