Do 99.9% Of Texans Recover From COVID-19?

Our weekly check-in with the Texas Truth-O-Meter.

By Alexandra HartAugust 12, 2020 3:25 pm, , ,

Allen West, the newly elected chairman of the Texas Republican Party, said recently that the state’s so-called recovery rate for the new coronavirus is 99.9%.

Is that a fact?

Madlin Mekelburg looked into this claim for PolitiFact Texas, based at the Austin American-Statesman. West brought up the alleged statistic in an interview on “The Mark Davis Show,” on Dallas-area AM radio station KSKY. Here’s what West said during that interview:

When I look at a state like Texas, which has 29 million in population, we’re getting close to I guess about 300,000 or so COVID-19-positive cases. There’s some questions about what a positive case really means, and, sadly, we’ve lost about 3,900 Texans. That’s only .01% of our population. If you just want to look at the facts, and I know everyone is concerned about this resurgence of COVID-19, but again we see more testing, more positive cases but yet the death rate is continuing to drop. I don’t want to see us get to the point where we’re imposing draconian measures, measures that go against our fundamental liberties and freedoms and rights over something that has a 99.9% recovery rate.

But Mekelburg pointed out to Texas Standard that West’s figures were out of date by the time he made that claim on July 27. Also, the way in which he came to his conclusion about the so-called recovery rate was faulty.

“The biostatistics experts that I spoke with said this is absolutely not how you would go about calculating a recovery rate,” Mekelburg said. “And I’ll say that they told me that they wouldn’t even begin to calculate a recovery rate, first of all.”

See how West’s claim scored in the player above.

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