FDA head won’t back Trump claim 99% of COVID cases ‘totally harmless’ : TheGrio

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Trump continues to peddle misinformation on the coronavirus pandemic

U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn (Photo by Kevin Dietsch-Pool/Getty Images)

Loyalty to President Donald Trump knows no bounds, even amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Since the beginning of the virus outbreak, Trump has repeatedly peddled misinformation when it comes to the severity of the respiratory illness.

In the most recent show of support regardless of the facts, the commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration did not claim nor deny that 99% of coronavirus cases are “totally harmless,” as the president suggested Saturday during a White House Independence Day event.

“I’m not going to get into who is right and who is wrong,” Dr. Stephen Hahn, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, told CNN‘s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”

“I totally support the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and the information that they’re putting out with respect to this pandemic,” Hahn said in the Sunday interview.

Hahn also said the coronavirus pandemic is “a rapidly evolving situation” and stressed that the U.S. “absolutely must take this seriously.”

The CDC estimates that 35% of COVID-19 cases are asymptomatic, but even people with mild or no symptoms can still spread the virus.

The World Health Organization has said the global fatality rate is likely less than 1% and that about 20% of all people who are diagnosed with the contagion are sick enough to need oxygen or hospital care.

According to John Hopkins University research, the U.S has recorded more than 2.8 million cases of the coronavirus and more than 129,000 people have lost their lives over it. The global positive case count is 11.3 million and the global death count is nearly 532,000 as of Sunday afternoon.

Meanwhile, Trump is preparing to officially accept his nomination at this year’s Republican National Convention in Jacksonville, Florida.

The convention, with events split between two southern 2020 battleground states, is scheduled for Aug. 24-27 in Jacksonville, Florida, and Charlotte, North Carolina. A mandatory mask requirement has been implemented for attendees to keep them safe.

Coronavirus cases in Florida have spiked over the past couple of weeks, but especially on Saturday. The state set an all-time high of the most coronavirus cases in the U.S. in a single day with 11,458 cases, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

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