Trying to understand his point is hard, but I think it has been explained to Trump this way: "We test more, so we have more cases, but we actually do a great job helping patients survive." Our death rate per case is actually pretty decent, but of course, there is more to this disease than death. Some survivors are struggling with long term health complications.
It doesn't take long to see the huge gaping flaw in this "logic." We have more cases than anyone in the world. Those numbers are coming down, but it's not clear if they really are decreasing, or we are simply hiding the numbers in places like Florida, Georgia and Texas. So, we have a raging pandemic, which - when creates a VERY large denominator in the ratio. The deaths - the numerator - is also a huge number. A 1,000 people a day are dying of this disease. At least 1,000 a day. The ratio of deaths to cases is only good because the cases are so very, very large.
This is the sort of math that a reasonably astute person would be able to pick up on. Not Trump, of course, but there is someone in the White House who understands this. They have made a conscious choice to explain the state of the pandemic to Trump in the only possibly positive way that they can: We have fewer deaths per case (because we have so many more cases). This is why Trump prattles on about testing. We do test a lot but not enough to get a handle on the pandemic. Betty Cracker puts it thusly:
The portion of the interview with the COVID-19 charts (first embed) unmistakably revealed why we’re in the mess we’re in for all who haven’t figured it out. It’s a Biden campaign ad and fractal portrait of Trump all in one clip. Trump’s people spend all day creating colorful, misleading charts to puff up the boss’s fragile ego, and Trump spends all day watching TV and throwing himself a pity party because no one else is praising his efforts. That’s the White House’s pandemic management strategy.
If we start the clock on this crisis on March 1 (which is being generous, it should be started January 1), then we are entering the six month of the pandemic. We still have absolutely no national plan for dealing with it. We have "advice" offered by various national health organizations like the CDC, the NIH and the Surgeon General, but we have no concrete plan to address this as a nation. It is the single greatest policy abdication in our history. Even Hoover tried to address the Depression, he just didn't do nearly enough. Trump has done nothing.
So, his aides have concocted a bogus metric to make him feel good, because the immense manbaby can't take bad news. This is the enabling of a narcissist who has skated free from consequences his whole life because his dad left him money and he was a celebrity on the New York tabloid scene.
What remains terrifying is that 40% of Americans think he is doing a good job.
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