According to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the coronavirus death toll is so high in the United States not because of a president who downplayed the virus' impending danger, but because of Americans' poor health.

During a CNN appearance, Secretary Alex Azar downplayed the effect the disease is having on America, as he believes our healthcare system has been able to contain the virus and thoroughly help those diagnosed, despite the number of deaths passing 90,000, according to a CNN tracker.

“While the burden has been tragic and terrible, it has remained within our healthcare system’s capacity,” he told CNN anchor Jake Tapper. “As the president said, we haven’t had any individuals to our knowledge who had to die because they didn't have a ventilator or didn’t have an ICU bed, and that’s a really important measure of healthcare system resilience.”

When Tapper acknowledged that the United States makes up less than 5% of the world's population, but 38% of the world's coronavirus deaths, Azar said another reason the country’s number of positive cases is so high is that the U.S. is testing at a higher rate, including asymptomatic people, which he says isn’t happening elsewhere.

“That leads to a significant difference," he said. 

He said that while he knew the government wouldn’t be able to stop the virus from spreading to the U.S., the Trump administration's goal was to “delay the curve and flatten the curve, and that’s exactly what we did.”

Azar added that underlying health conditions are a driving factor in the increasing number of COVID-19 deaths.

“Unfortunately, the American population is a very diverse and it is a population with significant unhealthy comorbidities that do make many individuals in our communities, in particular African American, minority communities, particularly at risk here because of significant underlying disease, health disparities and disease comorbidities, and that is an unfortunate legacy in our healthcare system that we certainly do need to address,” Azar told Tapper.

Tapper asked Azar to clarify his statements, as he believed the cabinet member implied that Americans are at fault for the country's disproportionate rate of COVID-19 deaths in comparison to the rest of the world.

Azar said that because Americans have a presence of more than one chronic disease, citing obesity, hypertension and diabetes, we are at higher risk of contracting and dying from the coronavirus.

Tapper did not want to fault the American people for having underlying health issues and said the government should still respond to the coronavirus sufficiently.

“One doesn’t blame an individual for their health conditions. That would be absurd,” Azar responded.

On Monday, Azar also blamed another entity for the devastating death tolls: the World Health Organization. According to Forbes, he alleged WHO "failed at its core mission of sharing and transparency" while speaking at the World Health Assembly's yearly conference. 

Despite a rumor that Black people would be immune to COVID-19, as Blavity previously reported, the coronavirus pandemic has disproportionately affected Black people.

A study conducted by amfAR and PATH’s Center for Vaccine Innovation and Access found that areas with a high number of Black residents accounted for 52% of coronavirus cases and 58% of COVID-19-related deaths nationally.

“In small metro areas as well as rural areas, we're seeing disproportionately higher COVID-19 deaths taking place in primarily Black counties,” Gregorio Millett, a lead investigator on the study and amfAR vice president, told Politico.

The study also found that many of these communities affected by COVID-19 also suffer from underlying health conditions.

Sherita Golden, endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism specialist and the chief diversity officer at Johns Hopkins Medicine said that Black communities, along with other minorities such as Latinx, Hispanic and Native American communities, “share common social and economic factors, already in place before the pandemic, that increase their risk for COVID-19.”

She said that living in crowded housing conditions, working essential jobs, less access to health care and chronic health conditions all play a factor in how and why minorities are being affected by the novel virus at a higher rate than their white counterparts.

President Donald Trump's dismantling of the White House's pandemic response team back in 2018, as well as the budget cuts to the CDC, have led to America getting hit harder than most countries, according to Vox. 

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN that earlier mitigation efforts, such as implementing federal social distancing orders before states did, "could have saved lives."

Trump also understated the threat the virus could have on the country back in January when he said his administration had it under control. 

“It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine," he said, according to HuffPost.

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