Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly offered a decidedly macabre take on the mounting global death toll from coronavirus, telling his former primetime colleague Sean Hannity that many of the fatalities here in the United States and elsewhere were already close to dying.

Per Sean Hannity’s radio show, the pair were contemplating how life could return to normal when O’Reilly commented about the good news from the global pandemic.

“I want life back to normal, can you fix that in a simple way?” Hannity wondered.

“Oh man I wish I could, you know?” O’Reilly responded.

“Oh, me too.”

“But we’re making little steps,” O’Reilly said, before equating the end of the Democratic primary as a boon for the world. “Bernie Sanders, you know, — he’s gone, that’s really good for everybody. The [US death] projections that you just mentioned are down to 60,000, I don’t think it will be that high. 13,000 dead now in the USA. Many people who are dying, both here and around the world, were on their last legs anyway.”

“And I don’t want to sound callous about that,” O’Reilly quickly added.

“You’re gonna get — hold on, you’re going to get hammered for that,” Hannity predicted.

“Well, I don’t care. I mean, a simple man tells the truth,” O’Reilly shot back, sounding not very much like someone trying to not “sound callous.”

“You mean people that have underlying conditions and that have compromise immune systems, any virus would’ve…” Hannity began to add, trying to help O’Reilly out.

“Yes,” O’Reilly agreed. “And not only that, they were damaged,” he added pointing out that the death rate in Italy and Spain is 10 times higher than in the United States.

“Somebody can break this to Bernie Sanders, number one, they have socialized medicine which is not nearly as good as our private system,” O’Reilly claimed, even though life expectancy in Italy and Spain is more than three years longer than in the United States and a recent WHO study on healthcare system performance found Italy and Spain ranked in the top ten globally while the US came in 37th. “But number two, many more people smoke in Europe than here.”

“And this ravages the lungs,” Hannity noted. “And they have an older population too.”

“Absolutely.”

“And they’re the ones that have been succumbing in the big numbers,” Hannity added.

“You’re going to see,” O’Reilly said, “the Centers for Disease Control, at the end of all this, is going to say this percentage of people who died from the virus, also had other things that killed them.”

Listen above, via The Sean Hannity Show (h/t Media Matters)

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