President Donald Trump has boasted repeatedly that he saved 2.2 million lives from COVID-19, using a figure in a British modeling study to support his claim.
That’s not true, the lead author of that report — epidemiologist Neil Ferguson — told HuffPost, adding that the number of American lives ultimately lost to the disease will depend on what states do from here on out.
“Epidemics are not like hurricanes — you don’t hunker down for a few days (or for epidemics, weeks) and then they’re gone,” Ferguson said in an email to HuffPost. “The final death toll from this pandemic will depend as much on what policymakers in different U.S. states do in the next few months as what they did since March.”
Trump compared COVID-19 to a hurricane last month.
“We made every decision correctly,” he claimed. “This was a hurricane, and it’s going to get better fast.”