WaPo Fact Check: Terry McAuliffe Keeps Lying About Child Covid ICU Stats

For weeks now, perhaps months, Terry McAuliffe has been using inflated numbers to scare Virginia voters away from Glenn Youngkin over Covid policies. Several media outlets have noticed and called him out over the issue, but it’s now come to a head. McAuliffe has frequently said things like, “yesterday in Virginia there were 8,000 new cases.” The issue with that is he said it day after day after day, and it can’t always be true. In fact, cases are down in the state, and the peak of hitting 8,000 new cases a day hasn’t been seen in quite a long time. The other inflated number is child cases, specifically hospitalizations and ICU beds, numbers which McAuliffe has grossly inflated as a way to scare parents who might be considering Youngkin.

The Washington Post, a liberal paper which has endorsed McAuliffe, finally took notice, and scored his Covid lies a whopping four Pinocchios:

We first became interested in this issue when McAuliffe in the second and final debate on Sept. 28 said that there were 8,000 coronavirus cases “yesterday in Virginia.” He then repeated the statement the next day and a week later, on Oct. 7.

But when we checked the records, you had to go back to January to find a single day when a combination of confirmed and probable cases in Virginia got close to 8,000. On Sept. 27, there were fewer than 2,000 confirmed cases.

Repeating numbers that are easily checked is just dumb politics, and perhaps lazy campaigning. However, it doesn’t look good when you want to be the one in charge of the state’s Covid policies but you appear to be mistaken or lying about the current numbers.

As for Virginia children in ICU beds? Another whopper of a lie that doesn’t even come close to matching reality:

And what about McAuliffe’s Oct. 7 comment that 1,142 children were in ICU beds? That number seemed totally off-kilter. (For the week ended Oct. 2, the number of children in hospitals, not necessarily in intensive care, was just 35.)

The McAuliffe campaign said that he simply misspoke. Okay, we moved on.

But then he said it again, on Oct. 21: “We’ve just 1,142 children in serious, in hospitals, in ICU beds.” That was still wrong: on that day there were only 334 people (of all ages) in ICU beds in Virginia, according the state health department data.

Why has McAuliffe repeatedly used a higher number than that? Good question. A spokesman for his campaign did not respond to emails and text messages over a period of four days.

As noted above, this paper endorsed McAuliffe for whatever reason, but they still felt compelled to correct his lies and misinformation on Covid case numbers.

The pandemic will continue to be a serious policy challenge for the next Virginia governor but there’s no reason for McAuliffe to hype the numbers. He earns Four Pinocchios.

There can be little explanation other than McAuliffe attempting to use big numbers to scare voters and parents. His argument has been that Republican Glenn Youngkin will roll back Covid policies and leave the state vulnerable. What better way to make your case than to lie about the numbers and inflate the number of children in ICU beds? After all, parents are abandoning McAuliffe at record rates over his stated belief that parents have no right to ask questions about their child’s education. He needs to bring them back into the fold by making them fear Youngkin’s Covid policies even if they agree with his education policies.

The real truth here is that McAuliffe is a say-anything kind of slimy politician willing to inflate numbers and use whatever means necessary to lie to the electorate in an effort to keep his party in power. It’s wrong, and kudos to the Washington Post for daring to fact-check a Democrat.