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Joecanada13, FALSE. Fact-checking President Donald Trump's claims about coronavirus

"You guys are lucky you have a smart president who closed the borders before everyone else. Biden would not of done that. Saved a lot of lives."

Amid the pandemic, Trump has made a number of false or misleading statements.

April 3, 2020, 3:23 AM AEDT / Updated April 8, 2020, 10:59 PM AEST
By Jane C. Timm

President Donald Trump, in daily news conferences at the White House and in interviews, has made a number of false or misleading claims about the coronavirus .. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/coronavirus .. and U.S. efforts to combat it, including some that put him at odds with health experts and that prompted clarifications from his own top health and science officials.

[...]

Claim: Closing the border to Chinese nationals "early" saved lives. Trump gets credit for travel ban, but effectiveness is hard to measure.

“Something we did very well is, when we stopped the inflow from China at a very early level, that was a good thing to do, a great thing to do. We would have had thousands and thousands of more deaths. And we also stopped the inflow from Europe at a very early level,” Trump said on March 29. “We had never done anything like it, where we closed our borders to a country like that.”

The U.S. barred entry by foreigners who had travelled in China in the past two weeks, with some exceptions, starting on February 2. But it's hard to know the impact of one decision — amid a rolling, nationwide response — on mortality.

One expert, Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the Columbia University National Center for Disaster Preparedness and a public health analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, called the travel bans a “mixed bag" in terms of effectiveness.

Stopping travel from China was coupled with inconsistent messaging from the White House .. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-administration-s-lack-unified-coronavirus-strategy-will-cost-lives-n1175126 .. on the potential severity of the threat. On Jan. 30 .. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/timeline-president-donald-trump-changing-statements-on-coronavirus/ , Trump said the U.S. has "very little problem," and through February, Trump was comparing the coronavirus to a flu.

“There was value in closing the border to Chinese nationals coming to the U.S. in the early weeks of this situation. Closing the borders to Europeans later? It was too late to make much difference. It’s a mixed bag,” he told NBC News.

[...]

Claim: The U.S. implemented a travel ban "way ahead of anybody else." This is false.

On April 1, Trump told reporters that the United States had banned "dangerous foreign travel that threatens the health of our people and we did so early, far earlier than anyone would have thought, and way ahead of anybody else."

The U.S. implemented a restriction on foreign travelers who had been in China in the past two weeks, at 5 p.m. Feb. 2. Italy had already done so by Jan. 31 .. https://edition.cnn.com/asia/live-news/coronavirus-outbreak-01-31-20-intl-hnk/h_ed756d2007470c7fb4eeb4492bafabf5 .. and North Korea had banned all foreign tourists Jan. 22 .. https://www.youngpioneertours.com/dprk-closes-border/ .

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-checking-president-donald-trump-s-claims-about-coronavirus-n1174356#anchor-ClaimTheUSimplementedatravelbanwayaheadofanybodyelseThisisfalse