A spokeswoman for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio seized on President Donald Trump's remarks about the upping of the city's death total to include those who died of a co-morbidity while having COVID-19.
"These were people with names, hobbies, lives," Freddi Goldstein told the New York Post. "They leave behind grieving loved ones. They deserve to be recognized, not minimized."
Trump's remarks were referring to New York City adding 3,778 past deaths to its COVID-19 death totals that had been declared to have died due to another co-morbidity.
"We report everything, and our reporting is good," Trump told reporters during the coronavirus task force daily briefing Wednesday, when asked why the U.S. has so many more deaths attributed to COVID-19 than any nation in the world. "We're reporting every death.
"In fact, I see this morning where New York added 3,000 [sic] deaths because they died, and they're now saying rather than a heart attack, they're saying it was a heart attack caused by this. So, they're adding.
"If you look at it, that's it. Everything we have is documented, reported. What they are doing is 'just in case' — that's OK. We have more cases because we do more reporting."
Trump added a rebuke of the veracity of China's mere 3,342 reported COVID-19 deaths, which is just 28.8% of New York state's 11,586 reported virus fatalities, most of them in New York City alone, including the 3,778 co-morbidity cases added retroactively this week.
"All I know is we report the facts, and we're a country that's getting better," Trump concluded in his response to the death disparity question.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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