When Trump said "I wanted to always play it down" and not "create a panic," did he believe that 11 million Americans were going to die?

11 million is what I believed, when I did my own math in early March. Multiply the U.S. population — 330 million — times the predicted death rate — 5% — and imagine an infection rate of 70%. You get 11.5 million!

Now, I'm looking at the transcript of Trump talking to Bob Woodward on February 7th, and Trump — comparing the coronavirus to the flu — says: "This is more deadly. This is 5% versus 1%, and less than 1%. So this is deadly stuff."

He believed the death rate was 5%! Fortunately, that turned out to be wrong, but Trump had to speak and act using the imperfect information he had, and — if he spoke truthfully to Woodward — he believed 5% of those who get infected would die. He envisioned a far worse dying off of Americans! I don't know what percent of Americans he thought would become infected, but he was using the same 5% death rate that I'd used to get to 11 million. Even if you go down to 30%, you still end up with a shocking number: 5 million!

Here we are today, thinking that approaching 200,000 is horrible, but back when Trump was talking to Woodward, I believe he was thinking that millions of Americans would die. The health care services would be overrun, and we would be dying without access to any care. Would health workers even continue to show up for work? How could the food supply chain continue? We would starve and, before that, panic about the prospect of starving. Americans would soon be at war with each other. There would be civil disorder — far beyond the Black Lives Matter riots — and the disease would spread even more quickly, with nothing to stop it.

In that light, consider what Trump said to Woodward on March 19th (in the same transcript), "Well, I think Bob, really, to be honest with you... I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic."

If the real prediction of death — 5 to 11 million — had been stressed in early February, how would we have behaved? Would we have flattened the curve and preserved access to medical care the way we did? There's a lot of trashing of Trump right now over how he handled the crisis, but the criticism of his effort to suppress panic is — in my view — completely wrong.