Trump vs Biden: COVID-19

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Fact
Check

By the end of March, President Trump personally refuted his own reassurances of an April end-date for the virus. In recently revealed interviews with veteran journalist Bob Woodward, Trump acknowledged that he was trying to downplay the threat of COVID so to not cause panic. No models of the pandemic had supported that timeline, and despite the confusion in the early months of the outbreak, record-breaking mortality rates were predicted for April.

At least 70% of all U.S. COVID-19 deaths could have been prevented by shutting down earlier and more effectively, a study of the first 117,000 deaths revealed. If all rates are constant, this means that 160,000+ lives could have been saved. More than 35,000 lives could have been saved by shutting down just one week earlier, and this number climbs to 54,000 lives saved if the United States had shut down two full weeks earlier than it did. Another 45,000+ lives in the future by taking preventive measures today. Even if businesses do remain open, Americans can still reduce their total mortality by about 22% if they adopt universal mask usage.

The Case for Trump

Biden claimed that every life could have been saved with the proper procedures. This is not correct. Almost every life could have been saved. But even countries like New Zealand and South Korea, which did everything perfectly, still experienced a handful of cases and a few mortalities.

Even states that have made aggressive attempts to perform contact tracing have met with problems due to the voluntary nature of individual participation and no national mechanism to force compliance, as some other countries have.

For further reading…

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/us/coronavirus-distancing-deaths.html

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.15.20103655v2

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-how-the-us-could-save-45000-people-from-dying-of-covid-19-by-november-2020-07-07

https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america?view=total-deaths&tab=trend

https://sites.uci.edu/energyobserver/2020/07/07/ihme-projects-masking-could-save-45000-lives-by-november/

https://www.livescience.com/wearing-masks-save-tens-thousands-lives.html

https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/19/faster-response-prevented-most-us-covid-19-deaths/

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.15.20103655v1.full.pdf

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/09/factchecking-bidens-town-hall/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/34-times-trump-said-the-coronavirus-would-go-away/2020/04/30/d2593312-9593-4ec2-aff7-72c1438fca0e_video.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-easter.html