CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Monday floated a conspiracy theory suggesting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, is cooking the Sunshine State’s coronavirus infections numbers.
For perspective, this same cable news host also uncritically parrots the Chinese Communist Party’s COVID-19 figures, going so far in March as to allege that the United States had the most coronavirus cases in the world.
“Facts first,” indeed.
Florida’s Health Department reported Monday morning that there were 8,892 new coronavirus cases, “the first time its daily case count was below 9,000 in at least two weeks,” according to ABC News.
If accurate, this is a welcome reprieve for a state that had seen a surge in infections. Cuomo, however, seems to be holding out hope that Florida’s numbers are actually not declining. Perhaps he is worried that, with Florida out of the picture, the public will turn its collective gaze to New York, where Cuomo’s chronically incompetent brother, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, has presided over the worst COVID-19 death toll of any state in the union, at 32,600-plus deaths. That’s more than five times Florida’s death toll, and Florida has a larger population than New York.
“Can we trust the data from florida’s [sic] governor?” the CNN host asked his 1.8 million Twitter followers Monday.
Can we trust the data from florida’s governor? https://t.co/1rLT3YzUYe
— Christopher C. Cuomo (@ChrisCuomo) July 27, 2020
Cuomo has not always been so incredulous when it comes to COVID-19 data.
In March, after the Johns Hopkins University pandemic tracker showed the U.S. coronavirus case count had surpassed 85,000, Cuomo heralded the troubling news, claiming even China, where the virus originated, was not as bad off as America.
“The United States now has the most coronavirus cases on earth, more than Italy, now even more than China where all this started,” Cuomo told his viewers.
That would indeed be a troubling statistic for anyone stupid enough to believe Beijing’s official figures, which Cuomo apparently is. For reference, Chinese officials claimed in March that new coronavirus cases had increased by only 1,782 since late February. This is extremely unlikely, especially considering China had previously said new cases had jumped from 920 to roughly 80,000 between Jan. 23 and Feb. 29.
“This is the fact,” Cuomo insisted, asserting something that was most certainly not a fact.
As a brief aside, “cases” is a largely meaningless and unreliable metric. It could mean a number of things. It could mean, for example, that the pandemic is spreading. However, it could just as well mean more people are testing for the virus. There’s a big difference between an increase in detected cases and an increase in cases. The “cases” metric also doesn’t account for asymptomatic patients. The metrics everyone should be looking at are hospitalizations and deaths. Those actually mean something.
Anyway, Cuomo is likely basing his suspicions on the say-so of a CNN-promoted geography graduate student who alleges, without proof, that the state’s Health Department is manipulating its coronavirus data. (What often goes unreported each time her allegation is covered is that, even if she is right, the discrepancy between her numbers and the state’s is trivial.) But he has also unhesitatingly promoted figures produced by the Chinese Communist Party, which has worked tirelessly to censor and imprison whistleblowers who tried to alert the international community to the dangers of the viral pandemic.
This is CNN.
