Back on March 15 President Trump (aka @realDonaldTrump ) tweeted “The USA was never set up for this, just look at the catastrophe of the H1N1 Swine Flu (Biden in charge, 17,000 people lost, very late response time), but it soon will be.”

Remember those days when 17,000 seems like such a big number. The message of the tweet was clearly that where Obama and Biden failed to save us in that pandemic, and President Trump would save us in this one. He would prepare the USA to fight the pandemic and certainly have a smaller number of deaths.

The H1N1 pandemic lasted well over a year. I’m not sure where the President got his numbers. Maybe he picked a number near the high end of the CDC estimate below

CDC estimates that between about 8,520 and 17,620 2009 H1N1-related deaths occurred between April 2009 and February 13, 2010. The mid-level in this range is about 12,000 2009 H1N1-related deaths.

Since we are just a few months into this pandemic and the US death toll is approaching 140,000, it would seem that this comparison no longer puts President Trump in a very good light.