Fact-checking the final presidential debate, from health care to immigration to coronavirus

The claims came thick and fast about the coronavirus, immigration, health care and race issues. Let’s get right to the fact-checks.

The number of coronavirus cases is climbing once again, after falling consistently between late July and mid-September. Cases are now at their highest point since early August, with almost 60,000 new confirmed infections a day. That’s only about 10% lower than the peak in late July.

Hospitalizations today are lower than in previous spikes, but in the past few weeks, there has been a modest increase. The positivity rate, which measures what percentage of tests come up positive for the virus, is also going up again during the past few weeks. Higher positivity rates are an indicator of community spread.

Fact-checking final presidential debate

Credit for shutting down the economy also doesn’t primarily go to Trump, but rather to states and local jurisdictions. In fact, Trump encouraged states to open back up beginning in May, even when there were high rates of COVID-19 transmission in those areas.

It is one of Trump’s favored shots to say Biden isolated himself in his basement. In the first few months of the pandemic, Biden did run much of his campaign from his Delaware home. He built a TV studio set in his basement to interact with voters virtually. But that changed. In September, Biden held events in Kenosha, Wis.; Lancaster, Pa.; Warren, Mich.; Tampa, Fla.,;Charlotte, N.C, and more. We counted 14 locations.

Joe Biden did not directly say that he thought that Trump shouldn’t have restricted travel from China to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus.

There are about 180 million people with private health insurance. But there is absolutely no evidence that under Biden’s health care proposal all 180 million would be removed from their insurance plans. Biden supports creating a public option, which would be a government-run insurance program, that would exist alongside and compete with other private plans on the health insurance marketplace.

Under Biden’s plan, even people with employer-sponsored coverage could choose a public plan if they wanted. And estimates show that only a small percentage of Americans would likely leave their employer sponsored coverage if a public option were available, and certainly not all 180 million. Experts said it is not socialized medicine.

When Trump first made this claim, he said Biden’s son Hunter Biden received the money. Extending the charge to the former vice president lacks any proof whatsoever. But here’s what we know about the origin of this claim.

Garten told the newspaper that the account had been opened to "pay the local taxes" associated with efforts to strike hotel deals in Asia, and that when "no deals, transactions or other business activities ever materialized," the account has remained "inactive" since 2015. The Times’ investigation confirmed tax payments made from the account from 2013 to 2018.

Hunter Biden’s position on the board of a Ukrainian energy company when Biden was vice president has long raised ethical questions for foreign policy experts.

In 2014, the Obama White House responded by saying members of the Biden family were "private citizens and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the Vice President or President."

When Biden launched his presidential campaign, his Republican critics pointed to a meeting he had in Ukraine in 2016 that led to the ouster of the country’s top prosecutor while the energy company was under investigation. But Biden was representing the administration's position in seeking the prosecutors removal, and he later boasted about the meeting, so it was no secret.

Biden told Ukraine’s president that a $1 billion loan guarantee was at stake unless the prosecutor left, a demand also supported by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

Biden has offered a variety of Social Security plans. Starting in the 1970s, he called for an increase in monthly benefits, then for a one-year freeze, then floated raising the retirement age, then backed a change in how benefits would increase. Today, he calls for higher monthly checks for the oldest beneficiaries.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Biden spoke in favor of Social Security freezes to rein in spending and reduce the deficit. Biden’s point was that no part of the government would be exempt from the effort to balance the budget.

As vice president during the Obama administration, Biden generally focused on protecting Social Security, and resisted moves to privatize it.

However, Trump also said he would look to Congress to maintain the program in that scenario by drawing on general revenues — potentially in excess of $1 trillion a year. The actuary said that if that approach were taken, it would leave benefits essentially unaffected. Even if Trump wanted to eliminate the payroll tax, he couldn’t accomplish it unilaterally; he’d need Congress to go along.

The term "superpredators" refers to something Hillary Clinton said in 1996 when referring to a "gang of kids." She did not specifically say superpredators were Black Americans, but decades later Clinton apologized for the comment.

But that statistic reflects only the net change in the federal prison population, not the number of people who were released. Moreover, it cherrypicks the high point during Obama’s tenure, and compares it with a year during Trump’s tenure.

A better measure is to compare the number of federal prisoners in 2008, the year before Obama became president, with his final year. Federal statistics show there were 201,280 federal prisoners in 2008 compared with 189,192 in 2016, a decline of about 12,088.

Both the Obama and Trump administrations used chain-link enclosures to hold immigrants at border processing facilities. The term "cages" has been used by Trump critics to describe this type of enclosure.

The claim about cages came during a question about family separations at the southwest border. The separations occurred under the Trump administration’s "zero-tolerance" policy to prosecute all adults crossing the border illegally, while their children were sent to the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, which placed them with sponsors (such as family members), in shelters, or foster homes.

The children are among 1,500 who were separated from their parents and whose cases were discovered later through litigation. Some of the separations happened under a pilot program that began in mid-2017.

The committee also established toll-free telephone numbers in the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and El Salvador to field calls from parents, and publicized them through non-governmental organizations and other community organizations in the United States and Spanish-language media outlets. The committee sent letters in Spanish and English to about 1,600 addresses provided by the government for those who had not yet been reached.

Biden has misstated his own position at least once in the past, but his opponents have taken that misstatement and wrongly presented it as his position.

Right before Trump talked about Biden’s "real plan," he named Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y., a prime architect of the Green New Deal proposal. Trump invariably says that is Biden’s true climate change policy.

It isn’t, although Biden’s website describes the Green New Deal as a "crucial framework." Biden’s plan aims for net-zero carbon emissions no later than 2050.

The $100 trillion figure applies to the Green New Deal. It’s based on a report by the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank. That report puts the cost at somewhere between $51 trillion and $93 trillion. The largest expenses are for non-environmental parts of the proposal: $36 trillion for universal health care and up to to $44.6 trillion for guaranteed union jobs with a family-sustaining wage. Whatever the similarities between Biden’s climate plan and the Green New Deal, Biden's plan doesn’t include the non-environmental elements. Without those pieces, there’s no way to get to the high-end estimates.

"If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75% in value," Trump said at a National Republican Congressional Committee fundraiser. "And they say the noise causes cancer."

A life cycle analysis looks at every step in the production of power, from making the equipment, to the daily production of electricity, to the final use of the equipment at the end of its useful life. Even though the steps are totally different for natural gas and wind power — the great majority of a windmill’s emissions come in making the equipment and erecting the towers — the final comparison can be apples-to-apples.

Trump did trail Clinton in the money race, and his ability to win despite that shortfall was notable. However, Trump had access to more than a "tiny fraction" of Clinton’s war chest.

The wiretapping claim has been dismissed as unsubstantiated by lawmakers from both parties, intelligence officials and the Justice Department.

As part of the Russia probe later led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the FBI investigated four men in the Trump campaign’s orbit. A report from Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz concluded that the investigation was justified and not politically motivated.

Biden spent his early youth in Scranton, living there for a decade and attending Catholic school. He was 10 years old when his family moved to Wilmington, Del., but he continued to spend most summers and holidays with his mother’s family there.