12 March 2021 — 1032 mst
Washington Post’s fact checker gives
President Biden a bum rap on Covid-19 deaths
During his national address last night, President Biden, trying to put the pandemic’s tally of deaths into historical context, said:
As of now, total deaths in America, 527,726. That’s more deaths than in World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, and 9/11 combined.
The Washington Post’s chief fact checker, Glenn Kessler, who sometimes makes a mountain out of a molehill, immediately pounced on Biden’s numbers, arguing that all in-theatre deaths (battlefield deaths plus accidents, disease, etc.) in those wars exceeded Biden’s Covid-19 count.
Kessler relied on a Congressional Research Service report and the Department of Veterans Affairs for his war death numbers.
War deaths are hard to count, and single digit precision is impossible
Biden meant killed and action plus died from battlefield wounds. That tally appears to be equivalent to, or slightly less than, the CV19 death tally for the United States.
War deaths per capita, however, undoubtedly exceed CV19 deaths per capita. Biden and his speechwriters should get better at doing that kind of math.
In his nitpicking, Kessler misses the point: Biden was giving the nation a yardstick for measuring the pandemic’s impact on American’s population, and that yardstick was more than good enough for putting the pandemic in historical context.