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Ty Webb said:
And...reality is delivered from the esteemed Dr. Birx

Click to expand...

Claim
Birx gave some specific figures. “We now have 370,000 tests that have been done. The majority of those — over 220,000 in the last eight days, which, those of you who have been tracking the South Korea numbers, put us equivalent to what they did in eight weeks that we did in eight days,” she said.

Reality
South Korea has tested 0.7% of its population, or about 1 test for every 149 residents over that eight-week period. The United States has tested about 0.1% of its population, or 1 test for about every 1,038 residents over the eight-day period.
 
Fact Checking trump Lies

Gov. Jay Inslee's comments and the media
Trump denounced "the fake news" for a report that Washington Gov. Jay Inslee had clashed with him on a Thursday phone call and had told him that "we need Tom Brady" in securing critical medical equipment rather than the "backup" Trump had pledged to be -- using the football metaphor to urge the federal government to take a leading role in the effort. (The Washington Post broke the story.)
Trump then said that Inslee did make the comment, but "meant it very positively -- but they took it differently." Trump proceeded to repeat that the reporting was "only fake news."

Facts First: The reporting on this exchange was not "fake news." Trump himself confirmed that Inslee did utter the "Tom Brady" quote, as did Inslee implicitly (with a joke about it on Twitter). There is no indication that Inslee's remark was meant to be interpreted in a manner substantially different than how the Post and other outlets interpreted it.

How unforeseen the coronavirus crisis was
Trump repeated his previous claim that "this was something that nobody has ever thought could happen to this country." He added, "Nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened."

Facts First: This is false. The US intelligence community and public health experts had warned for years that the country was at risk from a pandemic. Experts had also warned that the country would face shortages of critical medical equipment, such as ventilators, if a pandemic occurred.
You can read a full fact check here about some of the pandemic warnings. You can read a full fact check here about warnings about the need for additional ventilators in a pandemic.

Americans' views on coronavirus-related closures
Trump said, "We have to open up. We can't say, 'Let's close.' People don't want to close." He also said, "People want to go back to work. I'm hearing it loud and clear from everybody." He added, "This is the United States of America. They don't want to sit around and wait."

Facts First: While there is no polling data on how long Americans want the country's institutions to remain closed, it is clear that not "everybody" wants workplaces to reopen quickly amid an ongoing pandemic. A poll released on Thursday found that large majorities of Americans say the closure of businesses, schools and entertainment activities was necessary to address the pandemic.
A Pew Research poll conducted March 19-24 found that 89% of the 11,537 US adults surveyed thought the closure of K-12 schools was necessary, 91% thought canceling major sports and entertainment events was necessary, 85% thought limiting restaurants to carry-out only was necessary, and 71% thought requiring most businesses other than grocery stores and pharmacies to close was necessary.
A Fox News poll conducted March 21-24 found that 75% of the 1,011 registered voters surveyed supported a national "stay-in-place" order for everyone other than essential workers.
Public health experts have warned that it would be unwise to immediately abandon measures that keep Americans out of physical contact with each other.

The trade deficit with China
Trump repeated his regular claim that the trade deficit with China used to be $500 billion, saying, "$500 billion a year they were taking out. We had trade deficits that were so large nobody has ever seen anything like it."

Facts First: There has never been a $500 billion trade deficit with China. The 2018 deficit was about $381 billion when counting goods and services; the goods and services deficit fell to about $308 billion in 2019. (The deficit with China has not been $500 billion even if you only count trade in goods.)

The history of tariffs on China
Trump repeated another regular claim about trade and China: "They're paying us a lot of money in tariffs and other things. They never paid us 10 cents."

Facts First: Study after study has shown that Americans are bearing the cost of the tariffs; Americans make the actual tariff payments. That aside, it's not true that the Treasury has never received "10 cents" from tariffs on China. The US has had tariffs on China for more than two centuries; FactCheck.org reported that the US generated an "average of $12.3 billion in custom duties a year from 2007 to 2016, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb."
 
Chloroquine genius Didier Raoult to save the world from COVID-19

The substance so far failed in all antiviral therapies, but this didn’t prevent Raoult from deciding that chloroquine can cure corona virus infections, serious side effects notwithstanding. To prove that, Raoult treated 26 patients at his institution with the derivative hydroxychloroquine, alone and in combination with the antibiotic (meaning antibacterial!) drug azithromycine. The study was not randomised, ethically approved only after it already began, and it was not really controlled: the 16 control patients were treated in different clinics.

After some adjustments (patients removed, data points guessed), a preprint was published simultaneously with a paper in a peer reviewed journal Raoult basically controls. Next, a lawyer with whom Rault partnered with pitched the miracle cure to Fox News, which is the TV channel US president Donald Trump watches all day to get all his information. Trump then tweeted this:

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump
HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine. The FDA has moved mountains - Thank You! Hopefully they will BOTH (H works better with A, International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents).....

387K
9:13 AM - Mar 21, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy

Then chaos ensued.
 
Michigan Dr. Rob Davidson,

“Just had to take a minute for a brief message for our president,” Davidson began in a self-recorded video posted online. “I heard you were on Hannity tonight attacking my governor, a governor who issued a shelter-in-place [order], who from the beginning has taken this entire crisis seriously, who’s working overtime with her office and the hospitals systems in our state to get us ventilators, to get us masks, to get us the gear that we need, to help get us tests here in Michigan.
Here and everywhere else in this country we still don’t have enough tests,” he continued. “I’m still using one single paper mask for an entire shift because of shortages of PPE. We have hospitals here in Detroit and Michigan who are getting to the end of their supply of ventilators, and they’re going to have to start telling families that they can’t save their loved ones because they don’t have enough equipment here, now that the president canceled an order for $1 billion for ventilators from GM because they were worried about having too many.
President Trump, for you to blame anybody but yourself is expected, it’s predictable, but it’s just sad,” Davidson added. “We’re out here on the front lines trying to take care of our patients, working hard with our governors and the states, and all you can worry about is when you can get people back to work and back to church, and trying to make yourself look good in all this instead of taking the leadership role that you’ve needed to take for so long.
I still have people in this state who don’t believe that this is a big deal because you told them it was a Democratic hoax, because you told them it was just like the flu or a cold, that just like that it would be gone, when none of that was true, when your experts knew that wasn’t true — and now it’s proving not to be true,” Davidson concluded. “This lies squarely on you. You still need to order a national shelter-in-place [order], we still need more tests, we still the Defensive Protection Act to be fully operationalized so we can get ventilators and PPE. That is on you. Please help us on the front lines, President Trump, it’s all we’re asking. We need help from our national leadership.”
 
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