Joe Biden ignored suspicions that China concealed the true extent of the coronavirus outbreak when he criticized President Trump by pointing out that the United States has the highest number of reported cases of the virus.
“Donald Trump is not responsible for the coronavirus, but he is responsible for failing to prepare our nation — for the months during which he continually neglected dire warnings from experts and downplayed the threat to us and for the erratic and unacceptably slow federal response that has tragically lagged behind other countries,” Biden said in a statement on Thursday following news of a record 6.6 million jobless claims last week.
The former vice president, 77, continued: “Now, we have more coronavirus cases than anywhere in the world, and that is dealing body blows to our economy and to the welfare and well-being of millions upon millions of Americans.”
The number of reported coronavirus cases, while widely referenced, is not an end-all-be-all measure of the impact or spread of the pandemic.
Biden’s statement ignores widespread skepticism about China’s reported number of coronavirus cases. A classified U.S. intelligence report said that China has underreported total coronavirus cases and related deaths, according to three sources cited in a Wednesday Bloomberg story.
White House coronavirus task force response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said Tuesday that “probably, we were missing a significant amount of the data” from China, contributing to delayed responses to the pandemic worldwide.
According to the Johns Hopkins University tracker, China, the most populous country in the world, reported 82,432 cases as of Thursday afternoon. The U.S. had 226,374.
Varying levels of testing in different countries also contribute to differences in the number of confirmed cases. India, which has a population of over 1 billion people, has low testing rates and has reported only 2,341 cases, though officials suspect that number is much higher.
Looking at the total number of reported cases in each country also does not account for varying population size. Spain and Italy have far more cases per capita than the U.S., though that could change as the U.S. tests more people.
The Biden campaign did not respond to a request for comment on why the former vice president chose to point to the total confirmed cases metric.
The Trump campaign took a swipe at Biden for blaming Trump for part of the crisis.
“President Trump is leading the nation through the coronavirus crisis, but Joe Biden has decided to fill the role of the opposition, ineffectively sniping from the sidelines, stumbling through television interviews, and hoping for relevance and political gain,” Tim Murtaugh, the Trump 2020 communications director, said in a statement.
