Just Saying | Can we trust in Donald Trump’s claim that the coronavirus crisis will ‘go away in April’?
- Yonden Lhatoo hopes the US president somehow turns out to be right in predicting the Covid-19 outbreak will burn out in the coming summer heat, wishful thinking or not
“A lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat, as the heat comes in. Typically that will go away with April,” Trump declared. “I had a long talk with [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping] … He feels very confident. He feels that, again, as I mentioned, by April or during the month of April, the heat, generally speaking, kills this kind of virus. So that would be a good thing.”
It would indeed. As long as it’s not something he plucked out of thin air again, like his bizarre claim last November that “Hong Kong would have been obliterated within 14 minutes” if not for Trump’s personal appeal to President Xi who allegedly had “a million soldiers standing outside”, ready to put an end to months of social unrest in the city.
Of course, people will understandably take this with dollops of salt, given China’s track record for cover-ups and tight control over information. The illness that the coronavirus causes, now officially known as Covid-19, has already claimed more than 1,500 lives in the country, which continues to report confirmed cases in four-digit numbers every day.