President Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday night he's got a "hunch" the coronavirus death rate is "way under 1 percent," not the "false" 3.4 percent rate from the World Health Organization. Thursday's Late Show dramatized why hunches are no way to make medical policy.
The coronavirus "is all anybody's talking about," Stephen Colbert said at The Late Show. "You could say America has coronavirus fever — but you should not, that would be in poor taste." As of Thursday there were "210 confirmed cases in 18 states with double-digit fatalities, so last night, Donald Trump went on Fox News to lie about everything," he said. "Science is not based on hunches. That's why 'Bill Nye the Science Guy' is more successful than his rival 'Phil Munch, Man of Hunch.'"
"We really would have been better off with a monkey president," Jimmy Kimmel sighed on Kimmel Live. "Who cares what the immunologists say, Donald Trump has a hunch. Here's the thing: If you're president of the United States, you don't go with hunches. You have the world's greatest scientists at your disposal, you go with them."
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In his chat with Hannity, Trump "even floated the idea that people with the coronavirus could go into work," Kimmel said. "See, for him, going to work means sitting around watching nine hours of Fox News in his underpants, so he doesn't understand what that means. All he cares about is money. He's worried about the stock market before the election, so his plan is to pretend the virus away."
"Trump's been trying to pretend the problem doesn't exist because he knows he'll get blamed for it, and he knows that because if he weren't president right now, he'd definitely be blaming whoever was president," Seth Meyers said at Late Night. "In fact, yesterday, he even lied and blamed a past president for the current lack of testing." It's dumb to "blame Obama for something that didn't exist when he left office," he added. "And it won't surprise you to learn that this lie was immediately debunked — even the White House couldn't explain it."
"This is the kind of public health crisis that tests the competence and honesty of our president, and obviously Trump is completely unequipped on both counts," Meyers said. "We need truth, transparency, and testing, and we're not going to get it from Donald Trump." At least that's his hunch. Peter Weber
