Donald Trump declared live on television on Wednesday night that he did not believe the World Health Organization’s assessment of the global death rate from coronavirus of 3.4%.

“I think the 3.4% is really a false number,” he told Sean Hannity, one of his favorite conservative Fox News hosts, in a phone interview broadcast live.

“Now, this is just my hunch,” Trump began, before continuing that “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’ll get better very rapidly, they don’t even see a doctor, they don’t even call a doctor.”

He went on: “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.”

Trump to Hannity on WHO saying coronavirus death rate is 3.4%: "I think the 3.4% number is really a false number. Now this is just my hunch, but based on a lot of conversations ... personally, I'd say the number is way under 1%."



Astoundingly irresponsible. pic.twitter.com/uC9c03zX31 — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 5, 2020

He then plucked his own surmising of a likely death rate out of the air.

“You know, all of a sudden it seems like 3 or 4%, which is a very high number, as opposed to a fraction of 1%,” he said, perhaps referring to the typical death rate for influenza, which is well below 1%.

Trump said: “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%.”

Sources at the WHO pointed out to the Guardian that the 3.4% figure represented no more than a snapshot of the total number of reported deaths over the number of reported cases on the given day. “It’s not a mortality rate. But it is the math. The calculation on the given day.”

“Globally, about 3.4% of reported Covid-19 cases [the technical term for the novel coronavirus strain responsible for the outbreak] have died,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference on Tuesday.

The previous death rate had been given as an estimated 2% after the initial explosion of cases begin in China. The new virus outbreak has been compared to the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 – 1919 when mortality was between 2 and 3% of those infected.

The death rate of those contracting seasonal influenza is typically an estimated 0.1%.

As the number of coronavirus cases increases in the United States, conservative media outlets have condemned Democrats and media such as the New York Times and CNN for being critical of Donald Trump and his response.

Some of Trump’s allies in the rightwing media have defended the president and his response, and boosted the administration’s narrative that Democrats are using the coronavirus to further their own political agenda by exaggerating its severity.

Peter Hegseth, a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend, attacked Democrats’ criticism, saying: “They’re rooting for the coronavirus to spread. They’re rooting for it to grow. They’re rooting for the problem to get worse.”

Fellow Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt said of stock markets falling: “They [Democrats] are probably jumping for joy.”

Trump also appeared to reject his own administration’s advice for people feeling unwell to stay at home. He said: “If 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’ve had in the state of Washington, like you had one in California, I believe you had one in New York.”

There have been no deaths from coronavirus in New York.

On Thursday morning, New York city mayor Bill De Blasio announced there were two more confirmed cases of coronavirus, bringing the number of sufferers in the state to 13.