As the government mandates drastic measures to slow the spread of the new coronavirus, the question on many people’s minds is, why didn’t we see a similar response to other recent outbreaks?
President Donald Trump has repeatedly contrasted the COVID-19 coronavirus with the H1N1 swine flu outbreak in 2009.
Last week, Trump said this at a news conference in the Oval Office: “If you go back and look at the swine flu and what happened with the swine flu, you’ll see how many people died and how actually nothing was done for such a long period of time, as people were dying all over the place.”
WWL-TV used data from the World Health Organization and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track the increase of H1N1 swine flu in 2009 from the day of the first death – April 28th, 2009 -- compared with the rise of COVID-19 since the first U.S. coronavirus death was reported in Washington on Feb. 29.
