Kayleigh McEnany credits 'historic response' for declining U.S. coronavirus death rate

By Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times - Monday, July 6, 2020

The White House has been hammered over President Trump’s claim Saturday that 99% of all novel coronavirus cases are “totally harmless,” but what can be shown is that the U.S. death rate is on the decline.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany brought out two charts Monday, the first showing that the U.S. case fatality rate from COVID-19 continues to drop, the second indicating that the rate — the ratio between confirmed deaths and confirmed cases — is well below that of France, the United Kingdom and Germany.

“What the president was pointing to, and I’m glad you brought it up, was a factual statement, one that is rooted in science and one that was pointing out the fact that mortality in the country is very low,” Ms. McEnany told reporters at Monday’s briefing.

She also rejected the suggestion that Mr. Trump has downplayed the severity of COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus, saying he was emphasizing that “the vast majority of Americans who contract the coronavirus will come out on the other side of this.”

“What that speaks to is the great work of this administration with therapeutics and remdesivir and dexamethasone, and that’s what the president was pointing out,” Ms. McEnany said.

The Trump administration has sought to play up the good news about the coronavirus — that U.S. deaths per week have been dropping for weeks — amid alarm over the surge in confirmed cases. Thirty-seven states have seen infections increase in recent weeks as governors and mayors seek to reopen their hard-hit economies following the pandemic shutdown.

Mr. Trump said during his Fourth of July address on the South Lawn that nearly 40 million people have now been tested, adding that “by doing so, we show cases, 99% of which are totally harmless, results that no other country can show because no other country has testing that we have.”

The statement prompted a flurry of fact-checks and stern reprimands from media outlets and columnists such as CNN’s Maeve Reston, who accused the president of “gaslighting Americans about the threat to their health.”

The World Health Organization recently placed the global coronavirus death rate at less than 1%, which may have been what Mr. Trump was referring to, while noting that 20% of those infected will exhibit severe symptoms.

Ms. McEnany emphasized that the president takes the outbreak “very seriously.”

“Of course, he takes it very seriously,” she said. “Of course, no one wants to see anyone in this country contract COVID, which is why the administration has fought hard to make sure that’s not the case with our historic response effort.”

On Thursday, after the WHO held a two-day online meeting..the agency’s chief scientist, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, said the consensus for now was that the I.F.R. is about 0.6 percent — which means that the risk of death is less than 1 percent.” https://t.co/la1an9xjG9
— Amesh Adalja (@AmeshAA) July 6, 2020