And don't forget scientists have continued to gather and evaluate data since. We now have a much clearer (albeit still imperfect) picture of the disease and its behaviour.
For example, COVID's current "death rate" estimate is ~3x worse than flu. Versus Trump's "~5x" in your quote from Feb 2020¹.
People love to argue about such overall rates but for practical purposes, they're too crude a hammer – too aggregate, too high-level to be actionable. More importantly, we now have a better understanding of the groups at risk.
> [Infection fatality rate] measuring 0.002% at age 10 and 0.01% at 25. However, the rate progressively increased with age, growing from 0.4% at 55 to around 15% at 85.
Age and certain comorbidities seem critical. This knowledge shapes the global COVID response, allowing help to be significantly more targeted and effective. For instance, when rolling out national vaccination plans.
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¹ Whichever rate Trump was talking about – there's case fatality rate, crude fatality rate, infection fatality rate…