Tag: Trump lying to get re-elected

The data on coronavirus deaths doesn’t tell the story Trump claims it does

Washington Post logoOne of the perplexing things about the way President Trump uses numbers is the randomness. At times, he simply invents data, as with his repeated insistences that his approval among Republicans is at 96 percent. At others, he uses out-of-date or cherry-picked data to make his case. And sometimes it’s just a hodgepodge, numbers and comparisons picked seemingly at random, offered less as evidence of his thesis than as evidence-like tidbits meant to make his thesis seem more robust.

So we have this tweet, from Monday afternoon.

Few have mastered the art of jamming more information into fewer characters than Trump, so we’ll set aside for now the “China Virus” elocution and the phrase “Lamestream Fake News Media” beyond to say that each is formatted in the same way: a noun modified by pejoratives. Let’s instead consider the evidence-ish numbers Trump presents, that reduction of deaths by 39 percent and the low mortality rate. Continue reading.

White House claims remdesivir decreases coronavirus mortality rate

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Monday claimed the mortality rate of the coronavirus has decreased due to, among other things, the use of the drug remdesivir — which has not been clinically proven to have any effect on the COVID-19 mortality rate.

McEnany brought up the drug in response to a question about coronavirus testing after a reporter asked about President Donald Trump’s saying that the U.S. “tested almost 40 million people, by so doing we show cases 99% of which are totally harmless.”

Most experts say that it is too soon to focus on a decrease in mortality because deaths lag behind an uptick in case numbers. Continue reading.

Trump downplaying sparks new criticism of COVID-19 response

The Hill logoPresident Trump‘s repeated downplaying of the coronavirus pandemic is under renewed scrutiny as COVID-19 case numbers rise, and public health experts and Democrats are saying he is making it worse by effectively denying that the growing outbreaks are a problem.

The U.S. is expected to see a new high of 60,000 new COVID-19 cases a day this week, far above the peak when New York was the epicenter of the outbreak in April. Now there are four epicenters in the U.S. where hospitals are quickly becoming overwhelmed.

Outbreaks are growing in Arizona, Texas, Florida and California, which experts say are the new epicenters of the epidemic in the U.S. There is no end to these surges in sight and cases are increasing in 40 states, compared to just 10 a few months ago. Continue reading.