The worst moment of any of President Donald Trump's press conferences came Monday afternoon, wrote Aaron Blake for the Washington Post, and it seems to be getting a pass from the majority of the media.
“I think one of the things we’re most proud of is, this just came out — deaths per 100,000 people, death,” Trump said. “So deaths per 100,000 people — Germany and the United States are at the lowest rung of that ladder. Meaning low is a positive, not a negative. Germany, the United States are the two best in deaths per 100,000 people, which frankly, to me, that’s perhaps the most important number there is.”
Trump is right, it is perhaps the most important number there is, yet somehow his team doesn't seem to understand that the number is actually among the worst in the world.
"The United States is nowhere close to having one of the lowest per capita death rates," wrote the Post. "In fact, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, we rank ninth-highest out of more than 140 countries for which information is available."
Being among the top ten worst countries in the world when it comes to COVID-19 deaths is nothing to celebrate, whether the White House puts it on a hanging banner in the Rose Garden or not.
The U.S. follows behind Germany, Switzerland, Portugal, Poland, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland.
"Pairing the United States with Germany is another puzzling decision. Germany is one of the envies of the Western world when it comes to its coronavirus response, having ramped up testing very early and then dealing with a far less significant outbreak than its neighbors," said Blake. "But putting the United States next to it is ridiculous; Germany has about nine deaths per 100,000 people, as compared with about 24 per 100,000 people in the United States."
He noted that many of Trump's lies have a kernel of truth that can be uncovered among the lies, but in this case, it's outright nonsense.
What Blake thinks happened is that someone from the White House misunderstood the data from Johns Hopkins showing the fatality rate from transmissions in the United States is low. Meaning, when people get the virus in the U.S. they seem to be surviving better than those in other countries. It's the only positive in a horrific crisis.
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Blake closed by explaining that those numbers aren't deaths per 100,000 people and the chart doesn't include all of the countries of the world either.
"Some smaller ones have much larger case-fatality rates; the United States is still well inside the top half," he closed.
