Biden said that taxes should be increased on corporations and the wealthy to pay for new spending, as well as to address escalating inequality.Ìý

“My fellow Americans, trickle-down economics has never worked. It’s time to grow the economy from the bottom up and middle out,” Biden said.

He repeatedly urged Congress to act on a variety of measures, including issues like gun control and immigration that have frozen Congress for decades. He said police reforms proposed in the wake of the death of George Floyd should be enacted and specifically urged bipartisan consensus.Ìý

“I know the Republicans have their own ideas and are engaged in productive discussions with Democrats. We need to work together to find a consensus,” Biden said.

And he recounted a visit he made to a mass-vaccination clinic in Glendale, Arizona. “I asked a nurse what it’s like,” Biden said. “She looked and said every shot feels like a dose of hope.”

The coronavirus pandemic limited the audience to 200 masked and distanced members of Congress and other officials, down from a typical audience of about 1,600.Ìý

Only two members from the president’s Cabinet were invited: Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Chief Justice John Roberts represented the Supreme Court. First lady  were invited to watch the event virtually.

And for the first time in U.S. history, two women sat directly behind the president as he delivered his speech: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman to serve in that position.

“Madam vice president,” Biden said. “No president has ever said those words, and it is about time.”

For the most part, Biden’s statements about his progress and future plans aligned with estimates from think tanks or government data. In some cases, he left out information that would give Americans a full picture. Our PolitiFact partners checked his statements regarding a range of subjects. You can read their complete story . Biden also discussed the ongoing covid pandemic and other health care issues. Here are highlights from his speech:

During these 100 days, an additional 800,000 Americans enrolled in the Affordable Care Act when I established a special sign-up period to do that. 800,000 in that period.

This appears accurate but needs context.Ìý

Biden did create a special enrollment period for Americans to sign up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace plans, due to the covid-19 pandemic. That special enrollment period began Feb. 15 and will run through Aug. 15. According to  by the Department of Health and Human Services, more than 528,000 Americans enrolled in health insurance coverage since that special enrollment period began through March 31. A senior administration official said that Biden’s reference to the 800,000 new sign-ups reflected the most up-to-date tally, though it hasn’t been previously announced.

When I was sworn in on Jan. 20, less than 1% of seniors in America were fully vaccinated against covid-19. One hundred days later, 70% of seniors over 65 are protected. Senior deaths from covid-19 are down 80% since January.

This is largely accurate.Ìý

According to the , 0.8% of those age 65 and older had been vaccinated by Jan. 20. So Biden is correct on this point.Ìý

However, when Biden took office, the U.S. vaccination program had been in place only for about a month — the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines weren’t authorized for emergency use until mid-December. And  from the independent Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices prioritized vaccination of health care workers, and then long-term care facility residents. The next two phases included people 75 and older and then 65 and older, meaning that some states may not have started vaccinating these age groups until mid-January.Ìý

As of Wednesday, the CDC reported the share of those 65 and up who had received complete doses of a covid-19 vaccine and are fully protected at nearly 70% — it was 68.3%. The percentage who have received at least one dose is higher: 82%.

A senior administration official provided for all Americans, but not statistics specifically about seniors. That data shows the covid daily death rate dropped by nearly 80% from Jan. 20 to April 27.ÌýBased on additional,  provided Thursday by the White House, the overall decrease in the daily death rate for people older than 65 was between 92% and 95% — an improvement better than what Biden cited in his speech. [Editor’s note: This section was updated to clarify the data.]

°Õ³ó±ðÌý reported on April 22 that the best available data appeared to show covid deaths for those 65 and older had declined by more than 50% since a peak in January, but said the “picture is not entirely clear because the most recent data on deaths by age from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is incomplete and subject to revision.” 

The recession caused by the coronavirus pandemic was ‘the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.’

Two key metrics back this up.

The biggest economic hit since the Great Depression in the 1930s was generally considered to be the Great Recession from 2007 to 2009, but the recession caused by the pandemic packed a bigger punch.

The peak unemployment rate in the Great Recession was 10% in October 2009, but that pales compared with the peak unemployment rate during the pandemic, 14.8% in April 2020.

Sen. Tim Scott and the Republican Response

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), the Senate’s lone Black Republican, was chosen to deliver the GOP rebuttal to Biden’s speech. He said the president is dividing Americans and has failed to deliver on his promise of unity.

“I want to have an honest conversation,” Scott said. “About common sense and common ground. About this feeling that our nation is sliding off its shared foundation and how we move forward together.”

PolitiFact checked , including this statement in which he asserted that it has been safe for some time for schools to conduct in-person learning.

Our public schools should have reopened months ago. … Private and religious schools did. Science has shown for months that schools are safe.

Scott’s statement about what the science has shown is generally accurate, but omits public health experts’ warnings that schools should implement infection control precautions.

“Most private and religious schools have been open for the majority of the school year, and the vast majority have been extremely successful with minimal in-school transmission,” said Dr. David Rosen, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Washington University in St. Louis. “But this is based on the premise that schools are performing the proper mitigations, especially universal masking and preventing symptomatic children from being in the classroom.”

There have also been many examples of large public school districts that have had very few cases of SARS-CoV-2 transmitted in the classroom, Rosen said.

The American Academy of Pediatrics that said, “All policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school” for the fall 2020 semester. The recommendations included requiring students to wear masks, maintaining a physical distance of 3 to 6 feet and potentially including testing and temperature checks in the safety protocol.Ìý

Schools have increasingly opened for in-person instruction throughout the year, but some remain virtual. As of April 19, 4% of districts were fully remote while 47% of districts were fully in-person and about 48% of districts are offering some type of hybrid instruction, according to a tracker by the .Ìý

Rosen said it was the right thing to do to shut down schools in March 2020 when we didn’t know much about the virus.Ìý

“We continued to learn over the summer of 2020, and by the fall it was pretty clear that the virus was not as morbid in children and that masking was key in preventing person-to-person spread,” Rosen said.

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“Anybody that wants a test can get a test. That’s what the bottom line is,” March 6 during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Moments later, Trump added that anybody who needs a test gets one.

“But as of right now and yesterday, anybody that needs a test — that’s the important thing — and the tests are all perfect, like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect, right? This was not as perfect as that, but pretty good,” Trump said. (Trump’s mention of “the letter” and “transcription” was a reference to his .)

As large public gatherings around the United States are being canceled and some colleges are suspending in-person classes to avoid the spread of the disease, PolitiFact decided to fact-check Trump on his “bottom line” assessment that anybody who wants a test will get one.

He’s wrong. Current supply of the test is limited, and clinicians are the ones who decide whether a patient meets criteria to warrant testing. Testing is not as easy as just calling your doctor or pharmacy, saying you want to be tested for COVID-19 and getting it done.

“Unfortunately, it’s not that simple yet,” said Christopher Mores, a professor of global health at George Washington University.

There is greater availability of tests, but the number of labs involved in the testing process is still limited, Mores said. Testing is expected to increase as more commercial labs participate, but even they have limits in the number of patients who can be tested daily, Mores said.

PolitiFact found news reports of people who wanted to get tested and couldn’t, or of hindrances in the testing process. Here’s a sample:

• March 2 that a woman who had returned from Italy was told at a hospital that she likely had COVID-19 but was refused a test. The woman, not named by CBS Miami, said one of the reasons she wasn’t tested for the new coronavirus was because she was not in a high-risk category, since she was in her 30s and otherwise healthy. (She tested positive for earlier coronavirus strains, coronavirus 229E and NL63, according to CBS Miami.) The hospital and state health department did not comment on the case.
• March 11 that Texas’ largest public health lab can do a maximum of 26 tests per day. Doctors and hospitals did not yet have the capability to do tests on their own premises. (An NPR report this issue is not limited to Texas.)
• that the president of the California Academy of Family Physicians said no one had been trained to do the test. (The story published March 7 and was updated March 10.)

CDC: Health Care Providers Decide Who Gets Tested For COVID-19

The CDC on its website that if people come in close contact with someone who has the respiratory disease and they develop symptoms, they should call their health care provider.

“They will decide whether you need to be tested, but keep in mind that there is no treatment for COVID-19, and people who are mildly ill are able to isolate at home,” the federal health agency said.

Elsewhere on its website, the CDC , “Clinicians should use their judgment to determine if a patient has signs and symptoms compatible with COVID-19 and whether the patient should be tested.”

Factors to consider for testing whether individuals were in close contact with a confirmed or suspected COVID-19 patient within 14 days of symptoms, or if they traveled from affected geographic areas within 14 days of symptom onset.

Clinicians who want to test a patient should work with local and state health departments to testing through public health labs, CDC said. That process could be delayed if the labs are running at capacity.

Limited Number Of Tests 

The CDC is typically the first one to develop a diagnostic test because they have access before others to clinical specimens and viral samples. The CDC test then becomes the basis for tests developed by others. But there were manufacturing problems with the CDC test at first.

Trump administration officials have provided conflicting information regarding how many people can be tested. Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, acknowledged the confusion on March 7.

that production issues were eventually resolved by a third-party manufacturer. That manufacturer is producing tests for state public health labs, academic medical centers, community hospitals and other nonpublic health labs.

The CDC has shipped tests to public health laboratories to test about 75,000 people, Hahn said. Additionally, 1.1 million tests were shipped to nonpublic health labs, and around 1 million more tests were close to being shipped, he said.

But the number of tests shipped doesn’t equal the number of people that can be tested. For instance, 2.1 million tests would roughly translate to testing for 850,000 Americans, according to Hahn.

Manufacturers plan to scale up production so they can ship 4 million more tests by mid-March, Hahn said, and large commercial and academic labs are also expected to make more tests.

Our Ruling

Trump said, “Anybody that wants a test can get a test.”

This is wrong. Health care providers make the call on who gets tested, based on recommendations from the CDC. There’s an increase in the number of tests being manufactured, but an increase in the availability of tests does not mean that “anybody that wants a test can get a test.”

Trump’s statement is inaccurate and a gross oversimplification of the facts. We rate it Pants on Fire.

Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at Â鶹ŮÓÅ—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

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This story can be republished for free (details).