The claim: The coronavirus would weaken “when we get into April, in the warmer weather—that has a very negative effect on that, and that type of a virus.”
That's how we know he was lying. No one knows for sure yet. But he told us it would happen.
The truth: It’s too early to tell if the virus’s spread will be dampened by warmer conditions. Respiratory viruses can be seasonal, but the World Health Organization says that the new coronavirus “can be transmitted in ALL AREAS, including areas with hot and humid weather.”
April, I'll come back and let you know how it worked, O.K.?
The claim: The outbreak would be temporary: “It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.”
The truth: Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned days later that he was concerned that “as the next week or two or three go by, we’re going to see a lot more community-related cases.”
It's not how epidemics go. They rise exponentially, plateau for a bit, and then fall to very low levels.
The claim: If the economic shutdown continues, deaths by suicide “definitely would be in far greater numbers than the numbers that we’re talking about” for COVID-19 deaths.
Again, how do you know this is a lie? We already have a staggering amount of suicide in this country and who is to say it will not get higher?
There are about 123 suicides per day in the United States. COVID-19 is killing about 9 times that many people each day.
The truth: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that, in a worst-case scenario, 200,000 to 1.7 million Americans could die from COVID-19, The New York Times reports. Other estimates place the number of possible deaths at 1.1 million to 1.2 million. According to the CDC, suicide is one of the leading causes of death in the United States. But the number of people who died by suicide in 2017, for example, was roughly 47,000—nowhere near the COVID-19 estimates.
The claim: The Trump White House rolled back Food and Drug Administration regulations that limited the kind of laboratory tests states could run and how they could conduct them. “The Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we’re doing,” Trump said.
The truth: The Obama administration drafted, but never implemented, changes to rules that regulate laboratory tests run by states. Trump’s policy change relaxed an FDA requirement that would have forced private labs to wait for FDA authorization to conduct their own, non-CDC-approved coronavirus tests.
He lied. It never happened. But he did it.
The claim: The
Obama White House’s response to the H1N1 pandemic was “a full scale disaster, with thousands dying, and nothing meaningful done to fix the testing problem, until now.”
The truth: Barack Obama declared a public-health emergency two weeks after the first U.S. cases of H1N1 were reported, in California. (Trump declared a national emergency more than seven weeks after the first domestic COVID-19 case was reported, in Washington State.) While testing is a problem now, it wasn’t back in 2009. The challenge then was vaccine development: Production was delayed and the vaccine wasn’t distributed until the outbreak was already waning.
As usual, Trump just made up a story that had nothing whatever to do with reality.
The claim: “Anybody that needs a test, gets a test. We—they’re there. They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful.”
The truth: The country’s testing capabilities are severely limited. Many states have experienced a lack of testing kits, as my colleagues Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer have reported. Trump made this claim one day after his own vice president, Mike Pence, admitted that “we don’t have enough tests today to meet what we anticipate will be the demand going forward.”
Even his vice president denied his claim.
The claim: In an Oval Office address, Trump said that private health-insurance companies had “agreed to waive all co-payments for coronavirus treatments, extend insurance coverage to these treatments, and to prevent surprise medical billing.”
Read: The dangerous delays in U.S. coronavirus testing haven’t stopped
This is what they had talked about, but yes, and agreement overall was not reached on certain portions of this.
Yep. He shouldn't have lied about it. Or, if he didn't know, he shouldn't have made up a story to cover. Lie, either way.
The claim: Google engineers are building a website to help Americans determine whether they need testing for the coronavirus and to direct them to their nearest testing site.
It's a lie:
The truth: The announcement was news to Google itself—the website Trump (and other administration officials) described was actually being built by Verily, a division of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. The Verge first reported on Trump’s error, citing a Google representative who confirmed that Verily was working on a “triage website” with limited coverage for the San Francisco Bay Area. But since then, Google has pivoted to fulfill Trump’s public proclamation, saying it would speed up the development of a new, separate website while Verily worked on finishing its project, The Washington Post reported.
Trump habitually reconstructs reality to fit his imagination, and then announces it as if it were true. This is just one of many.
