CLEVELAND, Ohio -- There have been a lot of partisan arguments, bad takes, and conspiracy theories about the coronavirus floating in the media and on the internet the past few weeks.

Then there's Bill O'Reilly.

During an appearance on his former Fox News colleague Sean Hannity’s radio show Wednesday, O’Reilly was asked what he thought should be done to get life “back to normal.”

“We’re making little steps. Bernie Sanders, you know, he’s gone, that’s really good for everybody,” he said in comments first flagged by Media Matters. “The [U.S. 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.”

He added, "I don't want to sound callous about that."

Hannity quickly pointed out O'Reilly would "get hammered" for his comments.

"Well, I don't care," O'Reilly responded. "I mean, a simple man tells the truth."

O'Reilly went on to blame the deaths on underlying conditions, socialized medicine in Europe, and smoking.

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

Indeed, a CDC study released this week of nearly 1,500 patients hospitalized for COVID-19 shows 90 percent of them had at least one underlying medical condition. The top three: hypertension, obesity, and diabetes.

But during a press briefing Wednesday, Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus task force coordinator, said while the virus makes existing conditions worse, people aren’t dying from those underlying medical issues.

“Those individuals will have an underlying condition, but that underlying condition did not cause their acute death when it’s related to a covid infection,” Birx said. “In fact, it’s the opposite.”