Trump said more than 100,000 die from flu some years. That’s incorrect, data show

Upon his return to the White House after a brief hospital stay, President Donald Trump suggested Americans “learn to live with” COVID-19 like they did the seasonal flu because the coronavirus is “far less lethal” in “most populations.”

Trump also said “sometimes over 100,000” people die each year from the flu even with a vaccine, but according to the statistics, that’s incorrect.

Twitter flagged Trump’s tweet for violating its rules “about spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19.” Facebook took down the post completely for violating the site’s policy on COVID-19 misinformation, CNN reported.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the flu, also known as influenza, has resulted in between 12,000 and 61,000 deaths in the U.S. each year since 2010.

As of Oct. 6, more than 210,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 and more than 7.4 million have gotten infected with the coronavirus since March. That averages at about 30,000 deaths a month since the pandemic began, although some months saw more deaths than others.

Coronavirus statistics have even surpassed those of the 1968 pandemic that was driven by the flu, more specifically by an influenza A (H3N2) virus, which was the last time a flu outbreak caused close to the number of deaths Trump has referenced.

About 100,000 people in the U.S. died during that pandemic over three years, a time that saw few school closures and mostly normal business operations, according to an article published in the journal the Lancet.

Put another way, more Americans have died from COVID-19 than from the past five flu seasons combined, CDC data reveal. Between 2015 and 2020, the agency estimated that about 178,000 people died and will die from the flu.

The coronavirus has already taken 32,000 more lives in just seven months.

What’s more, a vaccine exists for the seasonal flu but does not — yet — for the coronavirus. This means many people have at least some immunity to the flu because of vaccination or prior infection, whereas the majority of Americans have not been exposed to COVID-19.

In a recorded March interview recently released to the public, Trump told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that he “always wanted to play [COVID-19] down” and that it’s “more deadly than even your strenuous flu….This is deadly stuff,” media outlets reported.

But Trump has told a different story in public.

On a Feb. 28 presidential rally in North Charleston, South Carolina, Trump said, “35,000 people on average die each year from the flu. Did anyone know that? 35,000 that’s a lot of people. It could go to a 100,000. It could be 27,000…. But think of it, you hear 35 and 40,000 people and we’ve lost nobody. You wonder, the press is in hysteria mode,” according to FactCheck.org.

That rally was one day before the first coronavirus death in the U.S. was reported in Washington.

Four days before he declared the coronavirus a national emergency, Trump tweeted, “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. 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!”

It’s important to note that the burden of the flu season depends on which viruses are circulating in a given year, the timing of the season, how well the vaccine is working and how many people get vaccinated.