Let's talk about the death rate for COVID-19 and how people need to slow their roll before saying it's not that bad.

First, we know for a fact it is that bad. Just look at what happened in New York. We don't have people renting meat trucks to store cadavers every flu season.

To put it in perspective, six times as many people died in the state of New York as do during the month of April than do in the average April. More people died in New York City than any month in the city's history, and they're not even done counting.

So yes, the caronavirus is deadly and people aren't "just going to die anyway."

So what about all these comparisons of the death rate with flu?

You have to look at is whether the measures are lab-tested or estimates.

When people are using death rates for the flu, they are just estimates, not lab-tested deaths. The high-end estimate for flu deaths was 62,000. The low end was 24,000. But in 2019, there were 7,428 lab-test-confirmed deaths from the flu.

In just over 2 months, we've had over 80,000 lab-test-confirmed deaths by COVID-19.

So there are two things that you have to keep in mind here. What is the timeframe you're talking about and what is the measure you're talking about?

If you're going apples-to-apples here, a smidge over 600 people per month had lab-tested deaths by the flu in 2019. So in two months, that would come out to 1,200. But because of the time of year, let's bump that up to 2,000 just for the sake of discussion.

That would the apt comparison. 2,000 vs. 80,000. That means 40 times as many people are dying of COVID as the flu, so no, the flu is NOT "just as bad."

There really is no intellectually honest way to estimate what the real mortality rate of COVID 19 is. But we know for a fact that it's far worse than the flu.

What about H1N1? That's the comparison Trump wanted to make on Twitter today.

During the entire 20-month span of the pandemic, 12,000 Americans died of it--fewer than died of COVID 19 last week.

Furthermore, within 1 month of H1N1, more than a million Americans had been tested.

It took over a month to get 1,000 people tested for COVID.

And H1N1 originated inside the United States, meaning that there was no forewarning.

Trump had 3 months to get ready. And even if you want to blame China for covering it up, Italy and South Korea weren't covering it.

While doctors in Italy were saying that they had to choose which patients' lives to save, Trump was calling it a Democratic Hoax and fake news.

And whatever semantics you want to play about whether he was calling the "disease" the hoax or the "reaction" a hoax is moot.

He thought it wasn't worth worrying about.

While Europeans were dying of the disease and streaming into the US, he kept bragging about his limited China travel ban. While the disease ran rampant, he bragged about his China travel ban.

He kept bragging about what a great security system he had as the burglars pillaged his house.

The point here is simple: Maybe the failure to react is the real reason we have it so much worse.

And Obama did that while pulling the economy out of its worst performance in nearly 60 years and turning it into the best economy in 60 years.

Trump took the best economy in 60 years and turned it into the worst economy in 90 years. And while no one could have completely prevented the COVID virus from spreading. Swift, decisive action could've lessened the blow.

And no matter how faulty death-rate comparisons people want to make can change that he both health of our nation and the health of her economy were significantly impaired by Trump's incompetence.