President Donald Trump on Tuesday underestimated his response to the coronavirus crisis and reiterated lies he had raised since the earliest days of the pandemic.
In a solo briefing in the White House that included a question-and-answer session with reporters – his first coronavirus briefing in months – Trump presented a newer sober projection for the country, as deaths exceeded 140,000.
“Unfortunately, it’s likely to get worse before it gets better,” Trump said. Southern states are struggling with crippling congestion that is overwhelming hospitals and killing tens of thousands of people.
But he still tried to blame the previous government for the delay of his own government, and he underestimated the toll the pandemic claimed on communities.
Here’s what he said, along with the facts.
Claim: US ‘fared much better than most’
This is false. The US has an uncontrolled outbreak and reports more than 50,000 news cases a day. By comparison, many smaller countries, such as Germany and Japan, report hundreds of new cases a day.
Other countries are struggling – Brazil and India are the second and third countries most affected by caseloads, but the US is still the worst documented outbreak.
Claim: US conducts ‘more than 50 million tests’
According to the graphs displayed behind Trump during his remarks, the US has done more than 45 million tests. This requires context, as the president cites the data point as a measure of the U.S.’s success in fighting the virus.
Public health experts say the number of tests carried out does not in itself indicate the success of a country in controlling an outbreak.
“It is pointless to indicate the total cumulative numbers per day. It is important, the context is important,” said Dr. Vin Gupta, a pulmonologist and health policy expert, said. who is an NBC News and MSNBC Contributor.
He said the rate of positive tests indicates that many more people are infected than are being tested, and he cited Arizona, where 1 in 4 tests is positive, as an example. “At the moment, our pandemic is out of control,” he said.
Allegation: ‘Our mortality rate continues to fall’ and is lower than ‘almost anywhere in the world’
This is misleading.
Trump is trying to make the US look better by emphasizing the relationship between confirmed deaths and confirmed cases – known as the death rate – among the more telling death rates.
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The former decreases as testing expands and detects lighter cases, while the latter reveals how many deaths a country has had in relation to its population. According to data from Johns Hopkins University, the US death toll is one of the highest in the world, thanks to the major outbreak. The death toll has dropped, but it is not lower than ‘almost anywhere in the world’.
Demand: ‘We closely monitor hospital capacity’ in countries with severe cases. “All the governors we spoke to say they have enough bed capacity.”
Although we can not verify what governors have said to the Trump administration, it appears that U.S. hospital capacity is strained.
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, on Monday sounded the alarm over COVID-19 hospitalizations, saying the state’s case study has the potential to harness hospital resources and staff.
Last week, NBC News reported that 54 hospitals in Florida have no beds available in their intensive care units and that there are still 40 hospitalss had less than 10 percent availability.
NBC News reported this month that Houston hospitals have been forced to treat hundreds of patients in their emergency rooms – sometimes for several hours or several days – in their hustle and bustle to reach the rising numbers of the pandemic.
Claim: ‘We have a lot of stock again, we are in a very good condition and can move it quickly’
Not according to the internal administration documents obtained by NBC News, which showed that the federal government does not have the capacity to provide medical professions with personal protective equipment.
Claim: The Trump administration inherited ‘many, empty cupboards’
This is a false statement that we have checked before. Both former Obama officials and previous news reports dispute this.
While Trump has not inherited empty shelves, congressional budget cuts may have depleted parts of the Strategic National Stock during the Obama administration. However, Trump did nothing to change that during the first three years of his tenure.
