Donald Trump has declared live on television that, as a result of a hunch, he didn’t believe the World Health Organization’s assessment of the global death rate from coronavirus of 3.4%.

“I think the 3.4% is really a false number,” he told Sean Hannity, one of his favorite conservative Fox News hosts, in a phone interview broadcast live.

“Now, this is just my hunch,” Trump began, before continuing that “based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this, because a lot of people will have this, and it’s very mild – they’ll get better very rapidly, they don’t even see a doctor, they don’t even call a doctor.”

He went on:

“You never hear about those people, so you can’t put them down in the category of the overall population, in terms of this corona flu, and/or virus. So you just can’t do that.”

He then plucked his own surmising of a likely death rate out of the air.

“But again, they don’t know about the easy cases because the easy cases don’t go to the hospital. They don’t report to doctors or the hospital in many cases. So I think that that number is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1%,” Trump said.