Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah examined the continued spread of coronavirus and President Donald Trump’s less than reassuring response to the pandemic on their respective shows Wednesday.
During a press conference yesterday, Trump announced that Vice President Mike Pence would head up the efforts to stop the spread of coronavirus, prompting Noah to crack: “I think this is great because Mike Pence has a lot of experience in this area — he’s been quarantining himself from women his whole life.”
And even though Pence, as governor of Indiana, infamously enabled an HIV outbreak after ignoring public health officials, Noah joked that he was still a better option than Trump, who seemed completely uninterested in the coronavirus, beyond its effects on the stock market. “That’s Trump’s real nightmare, if his stock market gets sick,” Noah said before breaking out his Trump impression: “He’d be like, ‘No, not my poor stock market, not Wall Street, I’ll nurse you back to health with my special chicken soup — it’s a KFC bucket poured with Diet Coke!”
On The Late Show, Colbert touched on the Trump campaign’s fear that coronavirus will hurt the president’s re-election bid, as well as Trump’s efforts to downplay the severity of the virus by accusing cable news of hyping up the danger. He also highlighted the congressional testimony of acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, who incorrectly compared the one-and-a-half to two percent coronavirus mortality rate to that of influenza, when in fact the mortality rate for the flu over the last 10 years is much lower.
“Chad, I’m sorry, the mortality rate for the flu is only around 0.1 percent, so he was only off by 2,000 percent,” Colbert deadpanned. “You’d be a terrible pharmacist. ‘OK, here’s your prescription, you’re gonna want to take 200 pills every four minutes, with a meal.’”
