Tuesday on “Democracy Now!” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) accused President Donald Trump of “incompetence” in his administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which caused unnecessary deaths.

Ocasio-Cortez said, “Overall, not just President Trump but this entire administration knew what was coming. Trump knew this pandemic was coming. The military knew this pandemic was coming. The CDC knew this pandemic was coming. HHS Health and Human Services knew this pandemic was coming. There was a structural but also universal refusal to acknowledge and, more importantly, to act. This pandemic and the casualties we are seeing is again not just do to coronavirus. There are people dying unnecessarily.”

She continued, “There are people not just dying in hospital. In New York City alone, we are seeing two to three hundred people dying in their homes a day, per day in New York City, inside their homes. In addition to the hospitalizations, these numbers that you are seeing all in all many of them are confirmed coronavirus cases. As you mentioned, many people do not have access to tests. So a lot of these deaths that you are seeing there are many more that are uncounted, that are being counted as pneumonia or being counted as other cases of death because those people are not able to get a COVID-19 test.”

She added, “These additional deaths many of them are unnecessary. They are deaths of incompetence. They are deaths of science denial. They are deaths of inequality. So it is important for us to acknowledge how unnecessary the level of crisis that we are at right now that is due to the incompetence of this administration, that is due to the lack of responsiveness of this administration.”

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