Fauci Warns at House Hearing Coronavirus ’10 Times More Lethal Than the Seasonal Flu’

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci urged Americans to take the coronavirus seriously by telling the House Oversight Committee its exponentially more lethal than the flu.

Fauci, who has been a central figure in the Trump Administration’s coronavirus task force, spoke before Congress on Wednesday and warned that the worst of the pandemic is yet to come. Later, as Fauci compared the coronavirus to the mortality and infection rates of previous epidemics, he put the situation into context by calling it “ten times more lethal than the seasonal flu.”

“The seasonal flu we deal with every year has a mortality of 0.1 percent. The stated mortality overall of this when you look at all the data, including China, is about 3 percent. It first started off as 2 and now 3. I think if you count all the cases of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection, that probably brings the mortality down to somewhere around 1 percent, which means this is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu.”

Fauci continued by explaining to Congressman Michael Cloud (R-TX) that the country should acknowledge the coronavirus as a “really serious problem that we have to take seriously.”

“People always say, well, the flu, you know, the flu does this, the flu does that. The flu has a mortality of 0.1 percent,” said Fauci. “This has a mortality of ten times that. That’s the reason I want to emphasize we have to stay ahead of the game in preventing this.”

Watch above, via C-SPAN 3.