From PolitiFact:
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.
Read the full story at PolitiFact, and hear how Trump’s claim scored in the audio player above.
