Dr. Anthony Fauci privately calculated that COVID-19 had a significantly lower fatality rate than what he told Congress a month later at the outset of the pandemic.

On March 11, 2020, the day that the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Fauci testified under oath that the death rate of coronavirus patients was 3%, up from an initial 2%.

“The stated mortality over all of this when you look at all the data, including China, is about 3%,” Fauci told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “It first started off as 2[%] and now 3[%].”

But just weeks before his congressional testimony, newly released personal notes show Fauci estimated that the true case fatality rate was “more like 0.2-0.3% rather than 2.0%.”

According to a diary entry, dated Feb. 8, 2020, Fauci believed the novel coronavirus caused only 0.2% to 0.3% of patient deaths, or 2 to 3 associated deaths per 1,000 patients.

Fauci reached this conclusion after speaking with fellow infectious disease expert Dr. Tom Frieden, who was the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under former President Barack Obama.

“He and I are on the same page in thinking [that] this is acting like a bad influenza in its transmissibility,” Fauci wrote, “and that the denominator is much greater than 34,867 (above) making the case fatality rate (CFR) more like 0.2-0.3% rather than 2.0%.”

Case fatality rate, which is used to assess the deadliness of an outbreak, is the proportion of patients who died from a disease out of all confirmed cases. Fauci was referring to the bottom factor in that formula, the total number of patients diagnosed with COVID-19. So if the denominator were “much greater” than reported, as Fauci believed at the time due to COVID-19’s high transmissibility, that would mean the virus’s lethality was far lower.

Fauci seemed to contradict himself when he appeared before Congress a month later, telling lawmakers that the fatality rate “started off” as 2% and climbed to 3%, an equivalent of 20 to 30 deaths per 1,000 patients.

Though cases of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection likely brought the mortality rate down to somewhere around 1%, Fauci argued that COVID-19 still had a fatality rate “10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu.”

“I think the gauge is that this is a really serious problem that we have to take seriously,” Fauci testified in March 2020. “I mean people always say, well the flu, you know, the flu does this, the does that. The flu has a mortality of 0.1%. This has a mortality of 10 times that, and that is the reason why I want to emphasize, we have to stay ahead of the game in preventing this.”

The pandemic-era diary detailing the former top infectious disease official’s private thoughts about the coronavirus, its severity, and how the nation should respond to the contagion was released by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY) ahead of last week’s hearing, where Fauci repeatedly refused to answer pointed questions concerning his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19’s actual fatality rate was much lower than early pandemic estimates. By 2023, the declared end of the pandemic, the WHO calculated an overall global case-fatality rate of 0.91%, or one-third of Fauci’s 3% estimate, which excluded mild or asymptomatic cases.

The Washington Examiner contacted Fauci for comment.