BUT MR. PRESIDENT, THE FLU AFFECTS VIRTUALLY NOBODY

Not long before he tested positive for COVID-19, President Trump insisted, falsely, that the disease is a threat only to a few categories of people.

President Donald Trump claimed Monday at an Ohio campaign rally that the coronavirus poses little threat to young people and “affects virtually nobody,” as the number of Americans to have died from Covid-19 climbed toward 200,000 in the United States.

“It affects elderly people. Elderly people with heart problems and other problems. If they have other problems, that’s what it really affects,” Trump told supporters at an airport outside Toledo.

“That’s it. You know, in some states, thousands of people, nobody young. Below the age of 18, like, nobody,” he continued. “They have a strong immune system, who knows. You look — take your hat off to the young, because they have a hell of an immune system. But it affects virtually nobody. It’s an amazing thing.”

Today he posted this on Twitter:

It's true that the U.S. death toll from 1968's flu has been estimated at 100,000. But that's atypical. As CNN noted today,

More people in the United States have died already from coronavirus than those who died from influenza during the past five flu seasons combined....

According to CDC estimates, this is how many Americans have died from the flu in recent seasons:

2019-2020: 22,000 (preliminary)
2018-2019: 34,000 (preliminary)
2017-2018: 61,000 (preliminary)
2016-2017: 38,000
2015-2016: 23,000....

About 178,000 people died in the five flu seasons running from 2015 until 2020, while more than 210,000 people died of coronavirus this year.

And the people who die of the flu are, for the most part, precisely the people Trump dismisses as not worth mentioning with regard to COVID.

Although influenza can affect individuals of all ages, most influenza-related deaths occur in the elderly (65 years of age and older) and in those with underlying cardiovascular and respiratory comorbidities. The elderly make up almost 15% of the U.S. population but represent 65% of the hospitalizations and 90% of the deaths associated with influenza. In 2006, influenza and pneumonia were the eighth leading cause of deaths, overall, in the U.S. and the seventh leading cause of death in the elderly.

In late August, Trump retweeted a tweet from a QAnon-linked Twitter account posting a misreading of Centers for Disease Control statistics that's now very popular on the right:

Trump and other right-wingers shrug off any COVID deaths among the elderly or those with comorbidities -- but want to count all flu deaths, even those among people in the same categories. You can't have it both ways.

Oh, who am I kidding? It's Trump and his base we're talking about. I'm expecting logical consistency from them?

By the way, let's not forget that Trump is elderly and has comorbidities. It may be inappropriate to say this, but if he doesn't make it, his demise shouldn't be attributed to COVID, should it? According to his own reasoning?