The Washington Post reports:

Donald Trump Jr. declared on Thursday night that coronavirus deaths had dropped to “almost nothing,” questioning the seriousness of the pandemic on a record-breaking day for new cases in which more than 1,000 Americans died of the virus.

Speaking to Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Trump Jr. pointed to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that he suggested show a declining coronavirus death rate.

“I went through the CDC data, because I kept hearing about new infections, but I was like, ‘Why aren’t they talking about deaths?’ ” Trump Jr. said. “Oh, because the number is almost nothing. Because we’ve gotten control of this thing, we understand how it works. They have the therapeutics to be able to deal with this.”

While medical advances and less-crowded hospitals appear to have reduced the death rate from the early days of the pandemic, scientists warn it’s not clear whether that’s a long-term trend, The Washington Post reported. As cases surge across the United States, fatalities are often a lagging data point for CDC researchers, and reports can be incomplete in capturing the actual rate at which people are dying from the virus and its complications.

Physicians are also fearful that the latest burst in new cases, including a record 89,940 on Thursday, will lead to a greater number of deaths in the coming weeks, according to the New York Times. [Continue reading…]