DONALD TRUMP says that the death rate percentage from patients with coronavirus is "false".
He made the claim during an interview with Fox News on Wednesday.
The President said he disputed the World Health Organisation's (WHO) death rate figure of 3.4%, stressing that the actual figure was "a fraction of 1%".
He cited that many people with coronavirus have quickly recovered and haven't reported their illness, and therefore statistically aren't taken into account.
"Well, I think the 3.4% is really a false number," Trump told Fox's Sean Hannity.
"Now, this is just my hunch but based on a lot of conversation with a lot of people who 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.
"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."
President Trump said that the WHO's estimated death rate for the coronavirus of 3.4% is a "false number," asserting that the real number is "way under 1%" during an interview with Sean Hannity pic.twitter.com/roWwYqLKRl
— Chris Cameron (@ChrisCameronNYT) March 5, 2020
He later claimed that "hundreds of thousands" of people have recovered from the virus, which has gone totally unreported.
Despite Trump's claims, officially there have been fewer than 100,000 confirmed cases worldwide, but that number is rising rapidly.
The World Health Organisation recently reported the global death rate from coronavirus stands at 3.4%, an increase from previous estimate of 2%.
"Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died," the WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on Tuesday.
The number 3.4% is based on the current data, and experts do believe the number could change. As Business Insider previously reported, "experts predict that the percentage of deaths will decrease in the longer term since milder cases of COVID-19 are probably going undiagnosed."
So far there have been 11 deaths from the virus in the US, and more than 150 reported cases.
