Under President Donald Trump, every coronavirus death was treated as his fault; under President Joe Biden, none of them are; but the fact remains that the COVID-19 virus is still killing hundreds — and, at times, thousands — of Americans each day.
The Wall Street Journal noted on Sunday:
The U.S. has recently averaged about 320 new Covid-19 deaths each day, and the average was above 400 before the Labor Day holiday weekend, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show. The rate is far below pandemic peaks, including levels above 2,500 a day during the Omicron wave early this year. But the country hasn’t matched lows closer to 200 a day reached during a lull last year.
Roughly 85% of people who died from Covid-19 through mid-August this summer were 65 or older, a Wall Street Journal analysis of death-certificate data show. The rate is similar to 2020 peaks, before vaccines were available. Deaths trended younger for much of last year.
Covid-19 is on pace to be the third-leading cause of death for the third straight year, said Dr. Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. Since 2020, it has trailed only heart disease and cancer, significantly reducing life expectancy.
Read the full Journal report here.
Some of those who are dying have received two doses of the coronavirus vaccine, as well as at least one booster shot. The vaccine has dramatically reduced overall mortality, but has struggled to keep pace with new and more contagious variants.
Under Trump, mainstream journalists accused the president of “mass murder” — even though the previously unknown virus emerged in China and affected the whole world, and even as Trump was pushing for the development of a vaccine that the mainstream media, under Biden, would tout as a miracle cure that workers ought to be forced to take or else lose their jobs.
The COVID-19 death toll under Biden surpassed that under Trump within the first 10 months of the Biden administration.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.