WASHINGTON—Dismissing the statistics as “totally overblown,” President Donald Trump publicly accused New York health officials Monday of inflating the state’s Covid-19 mortality rate by including African Americans in their calculations of the total dead. “It’s very unfair if you start adding in a bunch of people who died of the virus but were also very clearly black,” said Trump, who pointed to Texas, with its incomplete data-gathering and low rates of testing in minority communities, as a model other states should emulate. “Obviously, if you count blacks, it’s going to throw off your estimates of how bad this thing is. We’re doing a fantastic job containing the virus, but sadly some governors are stooping so low as to fake their numbers—not only with blacks, but with people born in other countries, too. You gotta ask whether they’re just doing this to try and make me look bad.” The president went on to demand that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo personally apologize to him for harboring African Americans to begin with.

Advertisement