Alexandria Oxasio-Cortez makes noise and news every time she opens her mouth, but that doesn’t mean her words have value. Sometimes she gets the science or economics wrong, and other times she speaks in sound bites. Remember when she compared illegal aliens to Holocaust victims?
But every time when you think she’s hit dumb-as-a-rock bottom, AOC digs even deeper. With a recent tweet, the socialist future of the Democratic Party made yet another wild claim to mislead the public.
“COVID deaths are disproportionately spiking in Black + Brown communities.
“Why? Because the chronic toll of redlining, environmental racism, wealth gap, etc. ARE underlying health conditions.
Inequality is a comorbidity. COVID relief should be drafted with a lens of reparations.”
That statement is not only ignorant…it’s not only just more “Fake News”…it’s also dangerous.
AOC Makes it up as She Goes Along
“You literally just made this up. Racial data on coronavirus deaths doesn’t exist yet.”
~ Dan Bogino, The Bongino Report
There is just so much wrong with AOC’s tweet that it’s hard to know where to start, But let’s take it one piece of nonsense at a time and see if we can get to the truth.
AOC claims that COVID-19 deaths among African-Americans and Latinos are “disproportionate”. That’s a very inflammatory statement that pushes the Left’s favorite victimhood narrative.
The Numbers Just Don’t Exist
But what is the basis of AOC’s claim? What’s her source?
The information page of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention DOES NOT break coronavirus down by race. Neither does the COVID Tracking Project. Nor does the database provided by Johns Hopkins University. Not even the numbers released by The New York Times show can give a racial profile of coronavirus victims.
An Incomplete Picture
In fact, the only readily-available data comes from ONE state — Illinois.
It is true that in Illinois, the coronavirus infection rate among Blacks and Latinos is about double their percentage of the overall population. It is also true that the infection rate among Whites is about half of their percentage. But there are a couple of problems with AOC using that as the foundation of her claims.
First, that is a ridiculously small sample size, ONE STATE, out of FIFTY. Without more data, zero conclusions can be made about the country as a whole.
As of this writing, there have been 7,697 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Illinois, out of the 261,438 reported in the United States as a whole. There have been 167 coronavirus deaths in the state, out of 6,699 in the country.
With less than 3% of cases and just 2.5% of deaths, Illinois shows that it’s far too early to call anything “disproportionate”.
That’s just bad math by AOC.
Second, the Illinois data breaks report breaks down infections by race, not deaths by race. So AOC is obviously basing her claim that minority deaths are “spiking disproportionately” on wild conjecture, at best.
At worst, she’s lying outright.
Whichever is the case, it only highlights what we’ve learned time and again before: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez LOVES to talk. But that doesn’t mean she’s worth listening to.