Search KoopaTV!

Translate

Thursday, January 7, 2021

Fact Check: Joe Biden's “We'll have another 200,000 Americans dead by the end of the year” Coronavirus claim

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - He was wrong, and you shouldn't trust Joe Biden with numbers.

Do you remember the second (and final) presidential debate between then-President Donald John Trump and opposition candidate Joe Biden on October 22, 2020? It was less than two weeks away from Election Day, but many voters had already cast their ballots. Still, many Americans hadn't yet voted, and both men really wanted to earn their votes... be it by the virtues of their own policies, or by spreading fear about the other guy's.

This meant that candidates and their surrogates would spout the occasional mistruth, misinformation, or outright lie. While KoopaTV made an effort to fact check some of these in our debate write-up, some of them were future-facing, which means you technically can't say someone is wrong, since it hadn't happened yet.

Among the claims made by Joe Biden (which I deemed “absurd” back in October) was the one he said in this clip in the first debate segment, which probably meant that most people watching heard it, as opposed to being tuned out by the end:




Here is a transcript of the specific clip from the above video, and then I'll go into the actual facts of the matter, and the implication of those facts versus what Joe Biden's affirmatively stated belief was:
BIDEN: “We're at a situation where there are a thousand deaths a day now. Thousand deaths a day. And there are over 70,000 new cases per day. Compared to what's going on in Europe, as the New England Medical Journal said, they're starting from a very low rate... we're starting from a very high rate.
The expectation is we'll have another 200,000 Americans dead between now and the end of the year. If we just wore these masks [holds up a mask], the president's own advisors have told him, we could save a 100,000 lives. And we're in a circumstance where the president, thus far, and still has, no plan. No comprehensive plan.”


Joe Biden fact check coronavirus 200,000 Americans dead 2020 presidential debate
That's what Joe Biden said would happen. Here's what really happened.


Joe Biden then outlined his own plan, which is basically the same as what the President Donald John Trump Administration has been doing. The President then said that a vaccine would likely come within a matter of weeks, or at least by the end of the year, which happened, though Joe Biden countered saying it wouldn't happen and there would be a “dark winter.”

Here are the facts. At the time of the debate, there were 223,393 deaths attributed to the Chinese Communist Party Virus in the United States of America. By the end of the year, there were 346,925 deaths attributed to that plague.

The change was only 123,532 deaths. That's a lot of people, yes, but it's far from “another 200,000 Americans dead” as Joe Biden had claimed. The actual death toll was only about 62% of the way there (and I'm rounding up, just to be charitable to Mr. Biden). Or, Joe Biden was a whopping 38% off.

If any business executive was 38% off their target for the year, they'd get fired. ...Conversely, if any business executive did 38% better than expectations, that would be fantastic and they'd be hailed as winners. (Personally, I'd be thrilled in a 38% increase in KoopaTV traffic.) But will the current President get the credit? Nah. Will the future one get dinged for being so off and pessimistic? I don't think other outlets besides KoopaTV are going to hold him accountable for his false predictions.

By the way, if Joe Biden's numbers are off by this much on the coronavirus, think about how much they'll be off when he says things like only a small percentage of people will see a tax increase under his administration, or the country will be running on primarily electric power by such-and-such year. Politicians aren't bound to their earlier statements and promises, and rarely are held accountable for being off. They overpromise and underdeliver. In this case, Joe Biden's claim failing to come true means over 70,000 more Americans got to celebrate the New Year (with their families?). Americans that Joe Biden cynically counted for dead just so he could make a cheap attack on his political opponent.

By the way, I've seen so-called fact-checking organisations refute Republicans’ claims that taxes on working-class Americans will go up under a Joe Biden administration... on the basis that Joe Biden said he wouldn't raise taxes on working-class Americans. ...Yeah, that's not rigorous fact-checking (and it's impossible to say what “will” happen long before it's due to happen, but that's what they did anyway). That's just being gullible and falling for a politician's word. Too bad the majority of the American voting population are, in fact, gullible. This election proved it.



Ludwig is well aware that the current President has made many promises during his campaign that never happened, though the difference is that those broken promises are already well-documented on other sites, while to Ludwig's knowledge, no one else fact-checked Joe Biden on this specific claim.

2 comments :

  1. Biden didn't make up that number, he got it from top research facility's prediction model. At the time of debate the prediction ranged from 150,000 to 315,000, so he quoted a rounded number in between. It's great that the vaccine rushed out in late November which they couldn't have predicted in October, and smart people heeded his advise to mask up and vote absentee, so that curved down to 123k. Gullible voters are the ones who allow themselves to get incited by an egocentric president and behave all cult-like, crying voter fraud when Trump's lawyers were asked to prove it but failed to produce concrete proof in courts.
    https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america?view=total-deaths&tab=trend

    Note that I refuse to comment on what I think about Ludwig, because I like your Nintendo-related articles. We can agree to disagree. Cheers :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for the comment! ...Cumcad. (Interesting name...)

      To clarify, I never said Joe Biden made the number up out of his butt, and however the models were made were how the models were made.
      Joe Biden, for his part, chose how to round the numbers (which prediction model to follow), and he chose to say it very authoritatively. He also wrongly stated that the President's vaccine roll-out plan was not going to happen, even though nothing the President said during the debate about the vaccine came out to be incorrect. Like, he normally engages in lots of hyperbole, but he was actually quite accurate.

      Anyway, I think fact-checking Joe Biden based on his choices of what to do with data other people gave him is very fair game. If he picked the 150,000 number, I would've been a lot less harsh on him. He didn't believe that more Americans would be smart enough to take more precautions. Something that should also be noted is that the experts and prediction models have tended to be wrong by the point of the debate (and to this day), so continuing to rely on them shows what kind of decision-maker Joe Biden may be.


      The voter fraud gullibility stuff is a totally different discussion. :x


      Thanks for liking my Nintendo-related articles, too! Hope to see you comment on those as well. ^.^

      Delete

We embrace your comments.
Expect a reply between 1 minute to 24 hours from your comment. We advise you to receive an e-mail notification for when we do reply.
Also, see our Disclaimers.

Spamming is bad, so don't spam. Spam includes random advertisements and obviously being a robot. Our vendor may subject you to CAPTCHAs.

If you comment on an article that is older than 60 days, you will have to wait for a staffer to approve your comment. It will get approved and replied to, don't worry. Unless you're a spambot.