Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden had a powerful response to President Trump's insistence that America should learn to live with COVID-19.
As he has throughout the pandemic, Trump downplayed the severity of the coronavirus during Thursday's final presidential debate. He talked about how he went to the hospital after his COVID-19 diagnosis but recovered quickly, implying that Americans can easily defeat the virus. "We're learning to live with it," Trump insisted.
Biden relayed a different reality. He spoke directly to Americans who lost loved ones to the pandemic, and then spun Trump's words into a message about all the Americans who have died. "Learning to live with it?" Biden questioned. "People are learning to die with it."
"We're learning to live with it," Pres. Trump says about COVID-19. "We have no choice."
"Learning to live with it?" Joe Biden says. "Come on. We're dying with it." https://t.co/zkoTdi6727 #Debates2020 pic.twitter.com/RUmW9qvsmX
— ABC News (@ABC) October 23, 2020
More than 220,000 Americans have died of COVID-19, and millions have contracted it. Case counts and hospitalizations have started to spike again in recent weeks as businesses and schools reopened.