In a wave of tweets and comments, President Donald Trump continued to distort the coronavirus pandemic:
In recent comments, Trump noted that other countries are recently experiencing increased concern in coronavirus cases. While this is true, their insistence and description of these outbreaks would possibly lead the public to mistakenly think that the United States is in better shape than some parts of Europe and Asia.
At a press conference on July 30, for example, the president spoke of “huge problems” happening around the world.
Trump, July 30: Around the world, they have huge problems. In many countries there was a resurgence that other people believe is doing well. Despite a wide diversity of pandemic approaches between countries, this resurgence of instances is happening in giant portions of our planet – Japan, China, Australia, Belgium, Spain, France, Germany, Hong Kong – puts where they think it was – they had done well. He’s back. And in some cases, he came back very strongly.
He then gave some astonishing statistics on the amount of expansion in coronavirus cases in some countries.
“Since the beginning of June,” he said, “new daily instances have increased 14-fold in Israel; 35 times, or 35 times, in Japan; and almost 30 times in Australia, to call some. They were countries that were doing incredibly well, leadership was praised.
Later, in an August 2 tweet, Trump retwed data on a crisis state statement in Victoria, Australia, adding: “Large outbreaks of China viruses around the world, adding countries that would have done a wonderful job. Fake news reports this. America will be more powerful than ever, and soon! »
The next day, Trump alluded to other countries with a “second primary wave” of cases in a tweet and said the United States had “better controlled the virus.”
The White House did not respond to our request for more information, so we do not know what precise days or source you used to make your comparisons. The construction cited through Trump is consistent, if not less, with the figures of Our World in Data, a task founded at Oxford University. Most importantly, primary adjustments are only imaginable because these countries had very few new cases of coronavirus in early June.
Japan, for example, had only 33 new instances on June 1, which multiplied 34 to 1,126 instances as of July 30, the day Trump comments. Similarly, Australia and Israel recorded only 10 and 59 cases, respectively, on 1 June, from 28 and 34 times to 278 and 2,001 cases on 30 July.
By contrast, the United States did not revel in such a significant replacement – less than four times – but it began and ended with more instances: 19807 new instances on June 1 and 74985 new instances on July 30.
Adjusted by population, only Israel is similar to the United States in terms of new instances of COVID-19, and averaged seven days higher than the United States on July 30. Beginning August 4, Israel fell under the United States; Australia has more than nine times fewer new instances consistent with the united States and Japan having more than 16 times fewer instances, based on Our World in Data’s seven-day moving average.
It is noteworthy that all the nations that Trump has selected for having controlled resurgences to reduce the number of their instances to low degrees in May and June, which the United States failed to achieve.
And even with the accumulation of instances now, all nations discussed through Trump, with the exception of Israel, are well below the average number of instances consistent with U.S. capital over seven days, or 183 instances consistent with millions of others. consistent with the day.
Hong Kong, which is not part of Our World of Data, does not publish more than 150 instances according to the day according to Worldometer, or approximately 20 instances according to millions of people. The United States has more than nine times as many new instances consistent with millions of people.
And while Trump suggests that the U.S. It has more instances because of more controls, it is not true that these other countries do not control as much. With the exception of Hong Kong, all nations decided through Trump conducted more checks consistent with the known coronavirus case than the United States.
At a press conference on August 3, the president noted “very significant impulses” in Spain, Germany, France, Australia, Japan and Hong Kong, and in reaction to a about the state of the pandemic in the United States, he said, “I think we’re doing very well, and I think we’ve done as well as any other nation.”
“If you look, if you look at what’s going on, especially now with all the outbreaks and nations they were talking about,” he said. “Remember that we are much bigger than India and China. China is booming. India has a huge problem. Other countries have problems.”
The United States, in many respects, “has not done so like any other country.”
Outbreaks in many countries have been smaller and have led to fewer deaths, even taking into account the most recent increases. South Korea, for example, reduced its number of cases after an increase in infections in March and largely maintained it, restricting the total number of cases to less than 15,000 and the number of deaths to 301. The Australian epidemic has also been painful compared to fewer than 20,000 cumulative cases of COVID-19 and 232 deaths as of August 4.
Meanwhile, the United States has accumulated more than 4.7 million instances and more than 156,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University’s COVID-19 marker. This equates to 14240 instances consistent with millions of U.S. residents, 281 consisting of millions in South Korea and 718 million in Australia.
On August 4, the United States had a mortality rate of 47.5 consistent with 100,000 inhabitants, Australia (0.93), Japan (0.8) and South Korea (0.58) had mortality rates of fewer than 1 user matching 100,000, according to Johns. Hopkins.Array
In an interview with Axios broadcast on August 3, Trump opposed focusing on the deaths as a proportion of the population, rather than indicating the deaths as a proportion of the total number of cases. “You have to rely on cases,” he said, saying statistics show that the United States “is inferior to Europe.”
The United States has a case skill rate of 3.3%, a decrease that in many European countries, adding France, Spain and Germany. But there are also many countries with declining rates that the United States, adding Australia (1.2%), Japan (2.5%), Israel (0.7%) and South Korea (2.1%).
This measure shows how fatal the disease has been for those known as infected, however, a 100,000-dwelling death check shows how the disease has affected a country’s general population.
The current scenario in the United States is also not optimistic. On July 29, Johns Hopkins researchers published a report calling for adjustments to the U.S. pandemic reaction. “Unlike many countries around the world,” the authors wrote, “the United States is not currently on its way to this epidemic.”
All countries want to be prepared for a resurgence of COVID-19 instances, which can expand rapidly. But Trump omits the fact that viral transmission in the United States has never declined substantially, unlike many countries that are consistent with the increases, and that there are more new daily instances consistent with the capita in the United States than in virtually every single country it has. Identified.
The president also said in a tweet that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had “wrong” by saying at a Congressional hearing on July 31 that the most restrictive closures in European countries had caused a sharper drop. in instances. than the United States has achieved. Trump falsely claimed the difference because of the evidence. “We have more cases because we’ve tried a lot more than any other country,” he said.
:: https://t.co/hhwYOrnWZn
– Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2020
At the Congressional hearing, Representative James Clyburn, President of the House Special Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, asked The Fauci: “Why has Europe largely contained the virus” while “the United States has noticed a stable buildup in new cases? Clyburn showed a graph of new daily instances of coronavirus that matched millions of people in the United States and Europe.
Fauci, July 31: The answer to that query is quite complex, however, I may want to go very briefly so I think there are at least some of the points involved. If you take a look at what happened in Europe when they closed or blocked or took safe haven there, no matter how you need to describe it, they did so with about 95% or more of the counterattacks. When you look at what we have done, even though we have closed, even though it has created many difficulties, we have closed only about 50 according to the penny functionally in the sense of total countercontrol. Which means that when we reached our peak like them, they dropped almost to a low baseline, as it showed very clearly.
But take a look at what happened with our baseline, go up, go down, and then limit to about 20,000 instances a day. Then we started with a very complicated transmission base that was going down the moment we tried to open the country.
Fauci went on to say that some states have reopened “very well” and others have not, and the latter “has caused the outbreak it shows on its chart there. And one of the explanations why it is not to do some of the things that [CDC Director] Dr. Redfield discussed in his opening statement, the universal masking disguise, crowd avoidance, forced physical estrangement, etc., etc. So that’s a confusing explanation of why those charts are like this and I hope that as we go along, we can oppose them and I think we can.”
Here’s a chart that Clyburn showed:
The explanation of Trump’s election for the difference – “We have more cases because we tested so much more than any other country” – reminded us of the president’s statement in a July “Fox News Sunday” interview that other countries, then mentioned to Europe, are only testing COVID-19 if it’s “really sick” and that “massive” tests in the United States “distort numbers.” As we have seen, many countries, besides Europe, have conducted more case tests shown than the United States.
Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told us in an email that “evidence of confirmed cases gives an indication of a country’s aggressiveness.” And many countries have much higher rates than the United States. »
As of August 3, the United States had conducted 12.3 COVID-19 case tests, using our World in Data’s seven-day moving average figures. This is less evidence consistent with case 20 – some European countries, excluding France and Sweden – the data that are available for these two countries go back to early July and May.
Of the countries recently discussed through the president, Spain conducted 16.3 case tests shown as of July 30, and Germany conducted 39 tests as of July 26. Israel (26.4), Japan (22.3) and Australia (244.8) are compatible with the evidence formed more consistent with the case shown.
Trump also made the misleading claim, in an August 3 tweet, that instances of coronavirus in the United States have accumulated “due to BIG evidence.” As we have written, an increase in testing will result in more cases, however, this takes into account the overall increase in some parts of the country. The percentage of positive tests has also increased in many states.
When we analyzed this factor in June, Katherine Ellingson, an epidemiologist at the University of Arizona, told us that case knowledge and evidence “suggest that network transmission is expanding and that accumulation in the number of instances is just an artifact of testing. . “
In some of the most affected states, the percentage of positive controls has increased especially this summer. For example, in Arizona, the average seven-day check positivity rate, as discussed through Johns Hopkins University, about 7% in mid-May, rose to more than 27% in July and has now fallen to 18%.
Florida had a positivity rate of 5% or less for the May high, but for the July-August high, the rate was more than 18%. In Texas, the positivity rate of about 5% at the end of May reached nearly 18% in July and between 12 and 14% in recent days.
As of August 4, Johns Hopkins University shows that 33 states are experiencing a seven-day increase in positivity rates.
Trump chose to concentrate on states below 5%. He said at a press conference on August 3, “Meanwhile, 18 states still have very low case counts and control positivity rates below 5%,” Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey, and New York. , among others.
Some regions have also noticed an increase in HOSPITALizations and deaths related to COVID-19, which do not happen if additional tests are the only thing in more cases of coronavirus.
Two members of the White House Coronavirus Working Group also contradicted Trump’s claims about the evidence. Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the working group, said august 2 at CNN’s “State of the Union” that the United States is in a “new phase” of the epidemic and that the virus is “more widespread.”
“What we see today is another march and April. It’s widespread. It is in rural areas where urban spaces are the same,” Birx said. “For all people living in a rural area, they are not immune to this virus.”
He said that other people living in multigenerational families in spaces where there is an epidemic “consider dressing in a mask at home, assuming you are HIV positive, if you have other people in your family with comorities.”
(Trump tweeted that after being criticized through House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Birx “took the bait and hit us. Pathetic!”)
Fauci told MPs at the July 31 hearing: “We see that if you do more evidence, you’ll see more cases. But the accumulation we are seeing is expanding in cases, as evidenced by the accumulation of hospitalizations and the accumulation of deaths. “
The seven-day moving average of deaths consistent with millions of U.S. citizens increased from less than 2 approximately in June and early July to July 3.38 on July 31, the day Fauci commented, according to Our World in Data.
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Q: Do hospitals inflate the number and deaths of COVID-19 to charge more?
A: The recent law will pay hospitals the highest Medicare rates for patients and COVID-19 treatment, but there is no evidence of fraudulent reports.