Wednesday, April 01, 2020

Trump supporters are already questioning coronavirus death toll to make the president look good

March 31, 2020 By Brad Reed

Some prominent Trump-supporting media personalities are already trying to defend the president’s response to the coronavirus pandemic by questioning the official number of people who have died after being infected.

As documented by Media Matters researcher Jason Campbell, right-wing radio host Mark Levin this week suggested that the official coronavirus body count tallies shouldn’t be taken at face value because there’s no way of knowing whether someone who died shortly after getting infected really died from the virus.

“I cannot find anywhere the definition of what it means to die from this virus,” Levin said on Monday. “In other words, if I got into the hospital, and I already have a very, very bad heart, and I’m not given a lot of time, and I have this virus and it puts me over the edge, does that count as dying from heart failure, heart disease, or a heart attack — or the virus? I don’t know!”

Levin wasn’t alone, however, as Campbell also found that Trump-loving Fox Nation hosts Diamond and Silk also said this week that the death toll is being exaggerated to damage Trump politically.

“In a matter of two weeks, a thousand people supposedly died from the coronavirus,” Rochelle “Silk” Richardson said this week. “But it took 39 days, from January up until February… for the first person to die!”

Richardson then said that the media deliberately made the number of COVID-19 deaths go up after Trump announced that he wanted to see the country reopened by Easter “to make him look bad.”

In reality, the increase in deaths from the virus was projected by scientific models to increase between now and Easter, so it’s not surprising that the number of deaths skyrocketed shortly after Trump made his since-retracted announcement about reopening the country by April 12th.

Mark Levin says coronavirus numbers are misleading, claiming “I cannot find anywhere the definition of what it means to die from this virus” pic.twitter.com/hYFlL2m1NU
— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) March 31, 2020

Diamond & Silk are speculating coronavirus deaths are being inflated to make Trump look bad pic.twitter.com/hBnB7422UP
— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) March 30, 2020

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