Fox News host Greg Gutfeld broke out a handmade chart on Thursday afternoon’s “The Five” to demonstrate how New York’s coronavirus response may have “caused thousands to die.”
Discussing a clip of Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s surprise at finding out that 66% of people who contracted coronavirus in the state were at home presumably under lockdown, co-host Emily Compagno commented that it could be evidence that “widespread lockdowns weren’t as effective as previously thought” before asking for Gutfeld’s reaction.
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“Nobody knows anything, and all of the assumptions that were made months ago could turn out to be correct, that this is an indoor virus and that outside when the weather gets better, whatever,” Gutfeld responded. “That could be wrong too, but my gut tells me that putting people in tight spaces who are sick doesn’t work.”
Bringing up Washington state’s “closed” nursing home system and the deaths there, the Fox News co-host called sending “sick patients” into a nursing home, as New York did, a “cause and effect.”
“They basically put sick, contagious people into rest homes instead of using that big beautiful boat that they had on the west side highway, and that caused thousands to die,” said Gutfeld before asking if his co-hosts would like to see the chart he made showing an upside-down pyramid.
“The top is elderly, infirm patients,” he explained. “These are the people that get hurt the most by the virus. If you protect that group, all the subsequent groups, their risk goes down. So what you have to do is protect this group and then the risk, the rate of infection will die out. Not completely but it will go down. It’s an upside-down pyramid. But every subsequent population benefits if you protect the elderly and the infirm.”
Instead, he contended, New York “didn’t protect the elderly and infirm,” instead sending “sick people in with” them, “which spread the disease and also got health care workers sick as well.” (RELATED: ‘That Really Snapped My Neck’: Mike Rowe Has A Bone To Pick With Andrew Cuomo’s ‘If It Saves A Single Life’ Remark)
After another discussion, co-host Jesse Watters asked Gutfeld to show his chart again, except turned upside down to show what Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis “did in Florida.”
“He sent all of Florida’s state resources to the elderly and sick in the nursing homes and kind of let other counties handle it the way that they saw fit,” said Watters. “Florida is in great shape and they have a very high elderly population.”
