The claim: “The cases are only due to our large body of evidence. Very low mortality rate! – President Donald Trump.
Trump made two statements in the June 23 tweet; PolitiFact considered the evidence statement to be false in a separate fact check. This verification analyzes the mortality rate claim.
PolitiFact decision: mostly true. This is one of the few coronavirus measurements that Trump can optimistically point to. The death toll has stayed just under 600 a day in mid to late June, but that’s more than two-thirds less than the peak of roughly 2,000 deaths a day in late April. The number of coronavirus deaths per day has continued to decline in June, despite the fact that the number of cases has increased.
Trump’s statement is accurate for now, though it’s too early to know whether the recent surge in new cases will lead to a spike in deaths in early July.
Discussion:
Epidemiologists say that due to wide variations in testing patterns, the data does not provide a clear picture of how likely someone is to die from the virus if they become infected with it. Gaps in testing leave too many cases undiagnosed to reliably determine a person’s probability of dying from the coronavirus, much less if the probability of dying has increased or decreased over time.
More information
PolitiFact is a fact-checking project to help you separate fact from fiction in politics. Truth-O-Meter ratings are determined by a panel of three editors. The burden of proof rests with the speaker, and PolitiFact rates the statements based on the information known at the time the statement is made.
Instead, researchers say, the strongest metric to assess Trump’s statement is the number of new coronavirus deaths reported per day.
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The number of daily deaths from the coronavirus has been steadily decreasing since it peaked in late April. In fact, even when infections have increased since early June, deaths have not.
At the peak in late April, more than 2,000 died of the coronavirus on a typical day. At the end of June, they are less than 600. That is still a lot of deaths every day. In total, approximately 115,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 to date.
The White House said the number of deaths per capita in the United States is also lower than in several industrialized countries in Europe that were affected by the virus. According to Johns Hopkins University, the number of deaths from coronavirus per 100,000 population is approximately 37 for the US, compared to 65 in the UK, 61 in Spain and 57 in Italy.
But other European countries have lower death rates for COVID-19 than the US, including the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark.
So why are deaths falling? There may be several reasons, and for now, they are somewhat speculative.
One possibility is that the initial wave of infections will disproportionately reach more patients with weaker immune systems, including those in nursing homes, or more vulnerable Americans who have not yet taken effective social distance. Conversely, the latest waves of infections may be reaching younger, healthier people who are better able to survive an infection.
Another possibility is that we are “improving treatment and keeping people alive,” said Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at Kent State University School of Public Health.
Still, epidemiologists warn that deaths are a lagging indicator. The disease often takes two to three weeks to run, meaning that harvesting new infections a day tends to lead to deaths that occur two to three weeks later.
“We might not expect an increase in the death rate until approximately 21 days since we started to see an increase in cases,” said Brooke Nichols, an infectious disease modeler at the Boston University School of Public Health.
So far, the age breakdown of deaths has been fairly consistent: People over 65 accounted for 81 percent of coronavirus deaths at the peak of mortality in mid-April, and that group still accounted for 82 percent. of deaths in mid-June, a time when the total number of deaths had decreased significantly, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As we are about two weeks into the national surge in infections, scientists will be watching to see if deaths begin to rise this week.
