Back when Fox News was still pretending that Trump was joking when he said "slow down the testing," Fox Business brought on their "medical contributor" Dr. Marc Siegel to spin the latest spike in COVID-19 numbers.
And spin he did, first by repeating the despicable Peter Navarro's lie that Trump was "joking." He wasn't.
And then the spin kicked in. "States like Florida and Texas and California have seen close to 4,000 or more new cases per day, but the flipside of that is, it's mostly young people," he told host Ashley Webster. "That's a positive because 20 to 40-year-olds we are seeing here tend to get milder cases and in fact, the death rate from COVID-19 is down 40% over the past two weeks."
If only he was right. ICUs have had plenty of people in that age group, and the death rate isn't kind to them either. What is it going to take to get Fox News/Business to acknowledge the very real danger of this disease? It's not just people with immune deficiencies or age! Otherwise healthy people end up on ventilators -- or morgues.
The good doctor failed to say that the death rate is only down because New York rates are still low, and that in fact ICUs are in danger of being overrun (see Arizona or Alabama, for example).
But the lies continued. "We are not yet seeing the surges in hospitals and the cases themselves tend to be mild," he reassured nervous Fox News viewers.
Yeah, that's not true at all. In fact, things are so bad in Texas that Governor Greg Abbott warned on Tuesday that the state reopening plans would have to be stopped if the hospitalization and infection rates continued to climb.
The state has since reported days of record hospitalizations and daily increases in reported Covid-19 cases. As of Sunday, there are 2,913 people currently hospitalized in Texas with Covid-19 based on a seven-day moving average, a 37% increase compared with a week ago, according to data from the Covid Tracking Project.
The state’s seven-day average of new Covid-19 cases has increased more than 86% compared with a week ago, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Abbott actually exhorted Texans to use their damn masks instead of bitching about them because liberty. But sure, Fox Biz, keep on lying to your viewers. I'm sure they won't be at risk. Nope, not at all.
