Trump Again Claims Coronavirus Less Deadly Than Flu, Prompting Facebook and Twitter to Block His Post

Both Facebook and Twitter acted Tuesday to flag a post by President Donald Trump in which he once again downplayed the new coronavirus by comparing it to the seasonal flu.
"Flu season is coming up!," Trump said in the post, as CNBC reported. "Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu. Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!"
This is not true. COVID-19 has killed 210,909 U.S. residents so far, according to the most recent figures from Johns Hopkins University. That's almost 10 times more than the 22,000 estimated deaths during the 2019-2020 flu season, following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) figures. The 2017-2018 flu season, which was the deadliest since 2010, saw around 61,000 deaths, CNBC reported.
The coronavirus also has a much higher mortality rate, NPR pointed out. The seasonal flu usually has a mortality rate of less than 0.1 percent, while the coronavirus in the U.S. has had an estimated mortality rate of between 0.5 percent and slightly more than one percent.
Facebook removed the post altogether around 11 a.m. Eastern Time, CNBC reported.
"We remove incorrect information about the severity of Covid-19, and have now removed this post," a Facebook spokesperson told CNBC.
Twitter did not remove the post altogether, but instead covered it with a warning that users had to click past in order to view the tweet and also prevented it from being shared. It posted the warning more than three hours after Trump wrote the tweet.
"This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19," the social media company wrote. "However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public's interest for the Tweet to remain accessible."
This isn't the first time that the social media companies have had to remove Trump posts for sharing false information about the coronavirus. In August, Facebook and Twitter removed posts that included a link to a video clip in which Trump claimed that children were "almost immune" to the disease. The Facebook post was from Trump's own account, while the Twitter post was from his campaign's account.
It is also not the first time that Trump has attempted to downplay the risks of the coronavirus by comparing it to the flu, CBS News pointed out.
"So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year," Trump tweeted March 9. "Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!"
However, in the time between the tweets, two key things have happened. First, journalist Bob Woodward released tapes of interviews in which Trump admitted to understanding the severity of the coronavirus more than he had revealed to the public.
"It's also more deadly than even your strenuous flus," he told Woodward Feb. 7.
Second, Trump himself tested positive for the virus late last week and spent the weekend in Walter Reed Medical Center. He left the hospital to return to the White House Monday, but is still sick with COVID-19, CBS News reported.
But neither the Woodward revelations nor his own experience of the disease have stopped Trump from downplaying the virus in public.
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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