Trump repeats false claim about COVID-19 deaths on Fox News

In the past week, President Donald Trump has repeatedly spread a false claim that COVID-19 is not as deadly as his own public health agencies have reported.

He retweeted a now-deleted post that alleged the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "quietly updated" the number of coronavirus deaths. He shared another tweet from a senior legal adviser for his reelection campaign that linked to an article whose headline said "only 9,210 Americans died from COVID-19 alone."

And, in a Sept. 1 interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, Trump said it himself:

"I saw a statistic come out the other day, talking about only 6% of the people actually died from COVID, which is a very interesting — that they died from other reasons."

"Well, they had comorbidities, which you’ve gotten criticized for," Ingraham responded.

She’s right — the president misconstrued data on coronavirus deaths. As of Sept. 3, CDC data show 185,092 Americans had died due to COVID-19, and some estimates put the death toll higher.

Trump’s claim traces back to a report from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), which is part of the CDC. Each Wednesday, the agency releases new provisional death counts for the coronavirus. The data is based on death certificates. 

In that report, the NCHS notes in a section titled "Comorbidities" that, "for 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned."

"For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death," the report says.

Those lines have inspired a rash of claims on social media, including those retweeted by the president, that say the CDC "adjusted" its coronavirus death counts and the disease is not as deadly as previously thought.

Those assertions are false — we rated a related Facebook post Pants on Fire. Several other fact-checkers have also debunked them.

Let’s recap why they’re wrong.

Comorbidities are conditions that patients experience in tandem with a primary condition. Think of conditions like cancer or diabetes, which the CDC has said put people more at risk of death if they contract the coronavirus.

The NCHS report shows that the vast majority of coronavirus-related deaths occur in patients with comorbidities. But that doesn’t mean COVID-19 was a non-factor.

"The point that the CDC was trying to make was that a certain percentage of them had nothing else but just COVID-19," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in a Sept. 1 interview with "Good Morning America." "That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of COVID didn’t die of COVID-19 — they did."

"The numbers that you’ve been hearing, the 180,000-plus deaths, are real deaths from COVID-19. Let there not be any confusion about that."

Featured Fact-check

Lou Dobbs

stated on March 2, 2020 in a TV interview

The United States is “actually screening fewer people (for the coronavirus than other countries) because we don't have appropriate testing."

So why do 94% of death certificates that mention COVID-19 also list other conditions? 

When a coronavirus patient is admitted to the hospital, the virus is listed on their medical record. Since the coronavirus attacks the lungs, perhaps they develop respiratory failure, which would also be listed on their record. Unfortunately, they die after going into cardiac arrest, so doctors take note of that, too.

RELATED: No, the CDC did not ‘quietly adjust’ US coronavirus deaths

All three of those conditions would be listed on the patient’s death certificate, but COVID-19 started the process.

"The people dying were not going to die but for the acquisition of COVID," said Dr. Myron Cohen, director of the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Jeff Lancashire, acting associate director for communications at the NCHS, told us in an email that 92% of the death certificates that mention the coronavirus state that COVID-19 was the "underlying cause of death."

"The underlying cause of death is the condition that began the chain of events that ultimately led to the person’s death," Lancashire said. 

We reached out to the White House and the Trump campaign for a comment, but we haven’t heard back.

Trump’s claim is inaccurate and ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire!