Citation From the March 4, 2020, edition of Fox News' Hannity

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): You extended your travel ban. You met with the pharmaceutical companies in the country. I understand you are meeting with -- you're going down to Atlanta to meet with the CDC leadership.

DONALD TRUMP (PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES): Right.

...

HANNITY: We have a report today the global death rate at 3.4%, and a report that the Olympics could be delayed. Your reaction to that?

TRUMP: Well, I think the 3.4% is really a false number. Now, this is just my hunch, and -- but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this, because a lot of people will have this, and it's very mild. They will get better very rapidly. They don't even see a doctor. They don't even call a doctor.

You never hear about those people. So, you can't put them down in the category of the overall population in terms of this corona flu and -- or virus. So you just can't do that. So, if, you know, we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work -- some of them go to work, but they get better.

And then, when you do have a death, like you have had in the state of Washington, like you had one in California -- I believe you had one in New York -- you know, all of a sudden, it seems like 3 or 4%, which is a very high number, as opposed to -- as opposed to a fraction of 1%. But, again, they don't know about the easy cases, because the easy cases don't go to the hospital.

They don't report to doctors or the hospital in many cases. So I think that that number is very high. I think the number -- personally, I would say the number is way under 1%. Now, with the regular flu, we average from 27,000 to 77,000 deaths a year. Who would think that? I never knew that, until six or eight weeks ago.

I asked that question. I said, how many people die of the flu? You know, you keep hearing about flu shot, flu shot, take your flu shot. But I said, how many people die of the flu? And they said, sir, we lose between 27,000 and, you know, somewhere in the 70s. I think we went as high as 100,000 people died in 1990, if you can believe that.

But a lot of people, regardless, I think it averages about 36,000 people a year. So I said, wow. And that's -- now, that's a percentage that's under 1% very substantially. So, it would be interesting to see what that difference is. But, you know, again, a lot of people don't report, because they get the coronavirus, and they get better relatively quickly.

It's not that severe.