The Washington Post - GOP senator says only "small" percentage of population might die of coronavirus
today
As President Trump cast the nation’s battle against the coronavirus as war, one high-ranking Republican senator seemed to play down the gravity of the pandemic, saying the number of Americans who might die would be 3.4 percent of the population at most.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, called covid-19 a “nasty disease” that is devastating to those who contract it.
“Getting coronavirus is not a death sentence except for maybe no more than 3.4 percent of our population ... probably far less,” Johnson said in an interview with his home-state newspaper. “We don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the highways.”
If 3.4 percent of the U.S. population perished, that would mean millions of fatalities and would be 10 times the U.S. deaths in every war that the United States has fought. ...
Some senators are not very good at maths. ๐