In an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Donald Trump declared that "children are almost immune" from coronavirus. The videos posted online have been deleted, but the trimmed audio is available here from CNN, which helpfully titled it "Trump falsely says kids are 'almost immune' from Covid-19," just in case its editorial position was in any way in doubt.

In his own inimitable vernacular, Trump says: "If you look at children, children are almost – and I would almost say definitely – but almost immune from this disease." He adds, "I don't know how you feel about it, but they've got much stronger immune systems than we do somehow for this. And they don't have a problem, they just don't have a problem."

His words may have the cadence of crazed ramblings, but so does everything he says. The question is rather whether or not he's correct.

By this point, the evidence of your own eyes should be enough to pass judgement on this. But here are a few statistics that stand out from the literature. Only a tiny fraction (0.8 percent) of Covid-19 hospital patients have been under the age of 19. Not a single child aged under 10 anywhere in the world has transmitted the virus to another person, despite a global effort from the World Health Organization to find one. And a large meta study across 26 counties found just seven deaths among children that were ascribed to coronavirus.