An April Filled with Repeats
Throughout April, the White House’s coronavirus task force briefings, at times, sparked feelings of fact-checking deja vu: President Donald Trump made many of the same inaccurate statements repeatedly.
The president – as is the case with many politicians – has exhibited a penchant for reiterating his talking points. But that political trait is compounded when Trump speaks in near daily briefings, many running well over an hour.
These news conferences contained information about how the coronavirus outbreak was affecting the United States, which has had more than 1 million cases and 60,000 deaths, and the government’s response to it.
But they also harbored this lengthy list of false, unsupported and misleading assertions — both on the pandemic and old standards we have been debunking for months, if not years. For more information on these claims, see the links provided below to our original stories.
Travel Restrictions on China
The president often talked about travel restrictions on China that his administration announced on Jan. 31 as a significant action to combat the coronavirus. But he exaggerated what those restrictions entailed and made unsubstantiated claims about their impact.
Not a “travel ban.” Three times during April — on April 7, 13 and 14 — he said he had imposed a “travel ban.” On April 8, he said he had “closed the border.” But the Trump administration’s travel restrictions stopped well short of a “ban.” They were not absolute.
When Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced the restrictions, he said the policy prohibited non-U.S. citizens who have traveled to China within the previous two weeks from entering the U.S. But he said the new rules didn’t apply to U.S. citizens and their immediate family members. In addition, the rules don’t apply to permanent U.S. residents. And they don’t bar importing goods from China.
A New York Times story on April 4 found that nearly 40,000 people had flown on direct flights from China to the United States in the two months after the travel restrictions went into effect. So Trump had hardly “closed the border.”
On six occasions in April, Trump said he had been “early” in imposing restrictions on travel from China. For example, on April 1, he said he acted to ban “dangerous foreign travel that threatens the health of our people. And we did that early — far earlier than anyone would have thought and way ahead of anybody else.”
But, as we have reported, 36 countries imposed travel restrictions by Feb. 2, the day the U.S. restrictions went into effect.
“What this data shows is that the United States was neither behind nor ahead of the curve in terms of imposing travel restrictions against China,” , a research associate on global health, economics, and development at the Council on, that has been tracking travel restrictions on China due to COVID-19.
